Women's History Month: Dorothea Lange

Here's to Dorothea Lange, influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist.

Lange contracted polio at age seven which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp."It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," she once said of her altered gait. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."

Lange was educated in photography at Columbia University in New York City.

With the onset of the Great Depression, she turned her camera lens to the street. Lange's studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Her second husband Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor of economics at Cal Berkeley, educated Lange in social and political matters, and together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years — Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.

Her most famous photograph from her documentation of the Great Depression was "Migrant Mother."

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to relocation camps, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority. Lange covered the rounding-up of Japanese Americans and their internment in relocation camps. Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded them.

In 1945, Lange was invited by Ansel Adams to accept a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts.

The true impact of her work was not felt until 1972, when the Whitney Museum incorporated 27 of her photographs into "Executive Order 9066," an exhibit about the Japanese internment. New York Times critic A.D. Coleman called Lange's photographs "documents of such a high order that they convey the feelings of the victims as well as the facts of the crime."

Sources: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0013.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange