Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was born May 26, 1895 and died October 11, 1965. She was an amazing photographer. She is known for her work during the Great Depression. She married Maynard Dixon and she had two sons with him. She divorced Dixon in December 1935 and married Paul Schuster Taylor, a Professor of Economics at the University of California in Berkeley. Taylor taught Lange about social and political matters.
In the beginning of the Depression she became interested in the struggle of people, and she began to photograph the homeless. These photos lead to her getting a job with the federal Resettlement Administration, later called the Farm Security Administration. They recorded rural poverty, the abuse of sharecroppers, and migrant workers for five years. Taylor interviewed and gathered economic data and Lange took photos. She distributed the photos of the poor and homeless to newspapers. These photos were major icons of that era. The picture she is most remembered for is the "Migrant Mother"
Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography in 1941. After Pearl Harbor, she gave the award up to document the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans with the War Relocation Authority. Her photograph of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance to the flag before they were sent to internment camps is a scary reminder of this policy of arresting people without charging them with crime. Her photos were so critical the that amy confiscated them. Lange was afford a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in 1945.
Lange co-founded the photography magazine Aperture. In the mid-1950's Lange and Pirkle Jones were asked to photograph for Life magazine Monticello, California and the loss of homes for its residents due to the damn of Putah Creek. Life did not use the piece, so she gave one whole issue of Aperture to the photographs.
Lange's health was very poor in the last 10 years of her life. Lange died of cancer on October 11, 1965.
Comments
Good info but no personal thoughts!