Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on May 26,1895. She was named Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn, but when she was 12 she dropped her middle name and assumed her mom's last name after her dad abandoned them. When she was 7, she contracted polio and it left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp. She studied photography at Colombia University in New York City. She moved to San Francisco in 1919, and earned her living as a portrait photographer for more than a decade. In 1920 she married Maynard Dixon a noted western painter and had two sons.
During the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera from the studio to the street, by taking pictures of the cities dispossessed. That led her to employment with the Farm Service Administration(FSA). She divorced Dixon in December of 1935 and married Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Together they documented rural poverty and migrant labor for the next 5 years, Taylor would gather economic data and Lange would take the pictures. From 1935 to 1939 she worked for the FSA and brought to attention the hardships of sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers. Dorothea Lange is best known for her photo of a women called Florence Owens Thompson, the title of the photo is "Migrant Mother." She died at the age of 70, from esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965.
I think it was interesting and that she is a pioneer for women.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap03.html
Comments
Well done!Your personal thoughts were brief though.