Presentation on Dorthea Lange, one of the first Documentary photographers of her time.

1. Camera: 4x5 Graflex RB Series D
1936

2. In 1913, Dorthea decides
to become a photographer.
She trains under Arnold
Genthe, most well known
for his photographs of
Chinatown and the 1906
San Francisco earthquake.

3. Clarence H. White, Self portrait Ring Toss,
Clarence H. White

4. During the Great
Depression, Lange began to
photograph the unemployed
men who wandered the streets
of San Francisco; pictures
such as White Angel
Breadline (1932)
These photographs led to a
commission in 1935 from the
Federal Resettlement
Administration, established
by the U.S. Agriculture
Department.
They hoped that Lange's
powerful images would bring
the conditions of the rural
poor to the public's attention.

5. The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother"
is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made
of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February
or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not
remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me
no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did
not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that
they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the
children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to
tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help
her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

6. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion.
“…and yet, even in the face of such
fate I firmly believe that these people
retained their pride, resolution
and courage.”
D. Lange, 1935

7. (Below) CocaCola baby bottle: Mother &
children, Tulelake, Siskiyou County, CA
(above) Children in a Democracy.
A migratory family living in a
trailer in an open field. No
sanitation, no water. They come
from Amarillo, Texas. 1940
(left) “Ruby” from Tennessee, daughter of migrant
worker living in American River camp near
Sacramento, Nov1936

8. If Dorothea Lange was alive today, she
would probably be out in United
Nations Plaza, talking with and
photographing the homeless. Shy as
she was, Dorothea Lange was always
interested in people: either her rich
clients who sat for their portraits in
her early career, or the migrant
workers from Oklahoma she spent
time with in later years.

9. There were three rules to which Dorthea always adhered;
“Whatever I photograph, I do not molest, tamper with or
arrange. Second; a sense of place. Whenever I photograph, I
try to picture as part of it’s surroundings, as having roots.
Third; A sense of time…I try to show it as having it’s
position in the past or the present.”

12. Between Weedpatch and Lamont, Kern County, California. Children living in a camp
By Dorothea Lange, April 20, 1940

13. Olivehurst, Yuba County, California.
One of the new settlers.

14. Left- Edison, Kern County, California. Potato picker, she is 52-years-old, has 8 children. Born in Tennessee, she lived and was
married in Oklahoma, then came to California. Family became migratory agricultural workers and after four years settled in Kern
County. She says, "I have a house and flowers." She and her husband work in the field at 35 cents an hour, 10 hours a day. This
class of people is known to the present migratory workers as "locals." Right - Grayson, Stanislaus County, California. He came to
California in 1936 from Albermarle County, Missouri. He is living in a self-built shack in Grayson, a shacktown community...He has
a job working in hay on nearby ranch. His grandfather, who has four sons and two daughters, all of whom now live in
California, says: "They wasn't raised to go chasin'. They was raised to stay home."

15. Dorthea came to the
Relocation Administration
with a sure sense of social
justice and of how
photography could reveal
inequality.
Country store (Dorothea Lange, 1939) Gordonton, North Carolina
Sharecropper kids, 1939

16. Internment
without
Charges
In the early „40‟s, yet another government
agency, the U.S. Army‟s Western Defense
Command, hired her to document
the uprooting and incarceration
of the Japanese Americans.

17. She could not support the
government‟s actions. She
was highly critical of what
she saw, and her photographs
reflected those views.
Instead of circulating
Lange’s photographs, the
government impounded them
during the war, later slipping
them, without fanfare, into
the National Archives.
American Oakland 1942: Japanese-American business owner forced to give up his store.

18. Lange took over 800 photographs of the
evacuation and imprisonment of Japanese
Americans during World War II. Included are
pictures of the California camp Manzanar.
Because of the war departments
embarrassment over the debacle, few remain.

19. Due to the stark photographs of the victims of the Great Depression of the 1930s that
were made by Dorothea Lange, she became a major influence on succeeding
documentary and journalistic photographers. She has been called one of the greatest
documentary photographers of the United States influencing such successors as Lee
Freidlander and Garry Winogrand.
Lee Freidlander
Garry Winogrand
“Women are Beautiful”

20. A quote by the Elizabethan writer Frances
Bacon was pinned to her darkroom door;
“The contemplation of things as they
are, without error or confusion, without
substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler
thing than a whole harvest of invention.”

21. After completing two years (1943-1944) with the Office of War Information and
receiving a Guggenheim fellowship award , she and her partner and husband
Paul Taylor travel through Europe, Asia, Indonesia and Egypt,
Dorthea Lange dies in October of 1965 in her hometown, San Francisco, California.
Paul Taylor, one of Lange's last photographs

22. Bibliography
ArtStor. September 2011.
http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml
BING Images. n.d.
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dorthea+lan
ge&view=detail&id=CF02359159F467E8628014F9422
19CD827CEBBC9&first=0&qpvt=dorthea+lange&FOR
M=IDFRIR
The History Place
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/lange/index.
html
Freedom Voices Photolist
www.freedomvoices.org/pholist.htm
Marian, Mary Warner. Photography a cultural history.
New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 2002.
Stepan, Peter. 50 Photographers You Should Know.
New York: Prestel Publishing, 2008.