Dorothea Lange American, 1895-1965

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) made the photographs through which the Great Depression entered our collective memory. Migrant Mother, made at a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California, in March 1936, is among the most reproduced photographs in history. The larger body of work—sharecroppers, migrants, breadlines and the dispossessed of the Dust Bowl—established documentary photography as a powerful instrument of public argument.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange contracted polio at the age of seven, leaving her with a permanent limp that she later said had shaped her character: “It humiliated me, guided me, instructed me and helped me.” She studied with Clarence H. White at Columbia University before moving to San Francisco in 1918, where she established a successful portrait studio. The Depression eventually drew her away from the studio and into the streets.

From 1935, Lange worked for the Resettlement Administration and, subsequently, the Farm Security Administration under Roy Stryker. Travelling with the economist Paul Taylor, whom she later married, she photographed the economic dislocation of rural America. Their 1939 book, An American Exodus, combined Lange’s photographs with Taylor’s field notes and the testimony of those they encountered, creating a new model for socially engaged photographic publication.

Migrant Mother depicts Florence Owens Thompson, aged thirty-two, with three of her seven children. Lange encountered the family at the end of a day’s work and made five exposures in approximately ten minutes, moving progressively closer to the subject. She transmitted the photographs to the San Francisco News, which published them within days; federal relief subsequently reached the camp. The negative remains in the Library of Congress with the Farm Security Administration archive. Because the image was produced as part of federal government work, it entered the public domain, contributing to its extraordinary circulation and its status as one of the defining images of twentieth-century America.

Lange’s government commissions also made her a critical observer of government policy. Her photographs of the incarceration of Japanese Americans at Manzanar and Tanforan in 1942 depict American citizens being tagged, assembled and confined with a stark directness that made the injustice impossible to overlook. The War Relocation Authority suppressed the photographs for the duration of the war; they entered the National Archives but were not widely published for more than six decades. Lange later photographed the Public Defender project in Oakland and, with Pirkle Jones, produced Death of a Valley, documenting the destruction of Berryessa Valley beneath a reservoir.

In 1941, Lange became the first woman photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1952, she co-founded Aperture with Ansel Adams, Minor White and Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, and she continued to work internationally, photographing for Life in Ireland, Egypt and Asia. She died in 1965, only months before the retrospective she had prepared with John Szarkowski opened at The Museum of Modern Art—the Museum’s first exhibition devoted to a woman photographer.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented Lange’s work in REWIND (2021), DISCOVERIES (2010) and TOPOGRAPHICS (2004).