When telling about her youth, Dorothea Lange commented wistfully, “Nobody knew who I was, what the color of my existence was, but there I was.” Her comment referred directly to her years in school. However, it also reflects deeper feelings of being “cast aside,” an unintended consequence of her family’s circumstances. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, Dorothea was the first child of Joan and Henry Nutzhorn, were children of German immigrants who made their home in the Hoboken shipping port situated across the Hudson River from New York City. Her father ran a thriving law practice in Hoboken while her mother, a former librarian, raised Dorothea and her younger brother, H

Daily walks through New York City and visits to her mother’s library further enhanced Dorothea’s role as an outside observer. She and her mother took the ferry from New Jersey to New York every day, and when Mrs. Nutzhorn worked nights, Dorothea had to make the return trip alone. These solo expeditions afforded her the opportunity to see New York's colorful inhabitants and scenery up close. Though parts of the city were very dangerous, Dorothea soon developed the ability to look at others without drawing attention to herself. Because she was "never obviously there," she could watch them without attracting harm to herself. This ability, as well as her lack of fear, would later enable Dorothea to become one of the world's finest documentary photographers.

Though her studio became a gathering place for local artists, Lange considered herself a tradeswoman, not an artist. She did not think her work was extraordinary, just useful, and for that she was proud. Lange ran her studio very efficiently and became known for her keen business sense as well as for her afternoon tea parties.

A sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Paul Schuster Taylor saw Lange's photographs and immediately sought to team up with her. Taylor was writing articles to publicize the terrible effects of the depression but felt he needed photographs to accompany his essays. Lange agreed to work with him, and their first effort was published in Survey Graphic in September 1934.

Lange took to the streets with her camera and began photographing those hardest hit by the depression. She photographed labor strikes at Fisherman's Wharf, displaced farm workers' camps outside the city, and breadlines set up by the few humanitarians willing and able to provide aid to the needy. She captured the sad and angry faces of the unemployed and mistreated, the dirty clothes and desperate smiles of mothers and their children, and the sense of longing and lost pride apparent in the families fleeing to California for refuge from the Dust Bowl crisis of the plains states. On these early excursions, Lange took two of her most famous photographs, "White Angel Breadline, 1932" (fig. 1) and "Street Demonstration, 1933." (fig. 2) She displayed her work in her studio, and soon art critics began to praise her photographs as "art for life's sake" (Meltzer, 72). Though Lange did not fully realize it yet, she had embarked on the career she would become most noted for, documentary photographer.

During visits to her mother's library, Dorothea realized her love of pictures. She spent hours poring through books of photography and art and hung copies of her favorite pictures on the walls of her bedroom. Dorothea was enchanted by art of all types and recalled having a religious-like experience seeing dancer Isadora Duncan perform in 1908. Duncan's ability to "electrify thousands of people at once" showed Dorothea that great art had the capacity to evoke strong emotional responses and move people to action (Meltzer, 14).

By 1920 Lange had met the man she would marry. A painter who frequented her studio, Maynard Dixon was a very popular Bay Area artist. Dixon’s influence on Lange, as an individual and photographer, was profound. During their 15 year marriage, the couple had two children, Daniel and John. Finding herself divided by dual loyalties of motherhood and of professional photographer challenged Lange for the next two decades. Equally important, Dixon’s aesthetic sensibilities directly influenced Lange’s emerging perspective as a documentary photographer. As a painter of landscapes and men and women of the west, Dixon nurtured Lange’s impulse to expose the public to those people whose existence, though often ignored, needed to be seen.

Some topics in this essay:
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