Dorthea Lange

When Dorothea Lange was born in 1895 Hoboken, New Jersey there was no way of knowing that she would one day become one of the great American photographers. She was born to second generation German immigrant parents, the first child of Henry and Joanna Nutzhorn.# Her father was a lawyer, her mother a gentle, beautiful women who sang amateur recitals. Two tragedies tested and helped to shape her in her childhood. The first was when she was seven years old and was stricken with polio. Her right leg from the knee down was impaired and as such she was called “ limpy” by the other children and would for the remainder of her life be lame. #This handicap haunted her; she accepted but hated it to the end of her life. At sixty-five she described its significance:

“ No one who hasn’t lived a life of a semi-cripple knows how much that means. I think it was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me. instructed me, helped me. and humiliated me. All those at once. I’ve never gotten over it and I am aware of the force and the power of it.”#

In Dorothea from childhood and through life, there was a constant effort to make a state

In 1935, Lange joined the Farm Security Administration, where she caught on film the hardships of migrant farm families escaping the dust bowl. #Images such as "Migrant Mother, California," a portrait of a young widow with her children at a pea-pickers' camp in Nipomo, managed to capture not only their subject's despair, but their dignity as well. Migrant Mother the portrait of a Californian migrant worker with her three children. The face of the young woman is marked by wrinkles, the gaze full of worry directed in the distance. To the right and left the two older children, seeking protection, lean against her shoulders, hiding their faces from the camera, while the small baby has fallen asleep on its mother's lap. This highly concentrated, tightly composed image has made Dorothea Lange an icon of socially committed photography. Combined with the essays of her husband, labor economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Lange's photographs offered a persuasive argument for government assis!

During World War II, Lange worked first for the U.S. War Relocation Authority, then the Office of War Information. Her photographs of the forced relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps raised civil rights issues about their treatment and in some cases were censored.# After the war, Lange's efforts included work as a staff photographer with Life magazine; photo essays on Ireland, Asia, South America and the Middle East; and participation in seminars and conferences. After her death from cancer in 1965, Lange's husband donated an archive of some 25,000 negatives and 6,000 vintage prints to the Oakland Museum of California.#

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