Nonetheless, his modesty was sometimes a posture, shyness, a way to avoid competition from other photographers who called their work art. In particular, Lange resisted the central motive of photographic modernism – the use of the camera to express his inner consciousness. This indifference to exploring her inner life by photography seems surprising at first glance, given that her success as a portrait photographer was based on her ability to express the inner life of others.
Langes ability to work well with people in her youth led to her success as a portrait photographer. Lange’s commitment to social justice and his belief in the power of photography remained constant throughout his life. In 1935, Lange married Paul S. Taylor, a professor of economics at the University of California, with whom he worked in the field.
When Lange was traveling for the agency around the country, he met a hungry and desperate mother and took several photographs of her, one of which became known as the Migrant Mother. He died in 1965, but his personal philosophy continues to influence documentary photographers and his breathtaking images allow Americans to see others in a new light.
Dorothea Lange (born April 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA — died on October 11, 1965 in San Francisco, California) is an American photographer and photographer who contributed to some of the most powerful and influential social documentary photographs of the modern era while working for the Farm Safety Authority (FSA) and a variety of other government agencies.
He photographed the desperate plight of the unemployed during the Great Depression he saw in San Francisco and his photographs were recognized immediately and led to the establishment of a commission by the US Resettlement Administration in 1935 to photograph migrant workers. He died in October 11, 1965 shortly before the MoMA retrospective opened with great success.
Dorothea was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Henry Martin Nutzhorn and Joan Lange Nutzhorn on 25 May 1895. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey to a first-generation German-American family, Dorothea Lange contracted polio at the age of seven, causing her right leg and foot to be disfigured.
At the time, she had never owned or used a camera but was already decided she would become a photographer; in 1918, she left New York with a friend with the intention of traveling the world, but her plans were interrupted after she was robbed, and instead became known as one of the first documentary photographers of a new type. Roughly half of the retrospective of 1966 included photographs of the last ten years of Lange’s life – more formal depictions of trees, gardens, family life.
In 1940, Lange created images to convey the spirit of the camps and often began to correlate signs of human courage and dignity with physical evidence of the atrocities of imprisonment. After being exhibited in 1966 at the museum of modern art under the name Pea Picker Family, California, the museum received its current name “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California” Although she lead a successful career in San Francisco as a portrait photographer in the 1920s, she began to photograph at the height of the Great Depression in 1933.
On one of the first excursions with the Graflex camera in tow he visited a nearby bakery that a woman had set up called the “white angel” to feed homeless workers. This led to the White Angel Bread Line in San Francisco, a photograph of a man turning his back on a starving crowd clenched hands and jaws – often seen as a symbol of collective despair.
As a result of this decision a photograph was captured of 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson and her three children who became known as the Immigrant Mother in the same year when Taylor was hired by the State of Emergency Management to study workers who came to California in search of agriculture, he invited Lange again to join him on a trip to Nipomo to collect peas. This was of course the bread and butter of his studio photography but it also became the basis for his documentary photography.
