Dorothea Lange was an extraordinary photographer. Born in 1895, she first worked for Arnold Genthe and studied with Clarence White at Columbia University. In 1918 she started a trip around the world and got only as far as San Francisco and finding herself stranded she opened a photographic studio. She also met Paul Taylor who would become her second husband and collaborator and he hired her to document migratory workers in California. In the early 1930s, Lange intuitively took her camera to the streets, recording the breadlines and waterfront strikes of Depression San Francisco.

In 1935 she began to work for the Resettlement Administration, which would later become the Farm Security Administration (FSA). She went to work for Roy Stryker and joined the company of Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Jack Delano, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Rothstein. Together they created an enormous photographic legacy for America before, during, and after the Great Depression.

This image is from a series Lange shot that documented the movement of over two hundred families from depressed farms in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin to Matanuska, Alaska. The Colony was part of Roosevelt's New Deal, and an effort to help those who lived in the most depressed rural farm lands re-establish themselves. There were several other colonies established around the same time. Within five years over 50% of the families had abandoned their new home sites.

With her photographs Lange was able to capture the emotional and physical burdens some many American's were experiencing. In 1935, collaborating with her second husband, labor economist Paul S. Taylor, she documented the troubled exodus of farm families migrating West in search of work. Lange's documentary style achieved its fullest expression in these years, with many of her photographs becoming instantly recognized symbols of the Depression.

In 1940 she became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for photography. During World War II Lange documented the forced relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps and recorded women and minority workers in wartime industries.

Lange documented many other great moments in her career, but her picture of sometime labor organizer, Florence Owens Thompson, mostly referred to as "Migrant Mother," stands apart from all but a few others in telling the human story of a profound time in American history. Lange did not see photography as an art form, but as documenting the lives and conditions of the suffering and each of her images tells its own story. Her prints hang in many museums around the world. She died in 1965, her unique collection becoming a gift to the Oakland Museum of California.

Medium : 1 negative : nitrate

Created/Published : 1935

Creator : Dorothea Lange, photographer, 1895 - 1965

Part of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) - Office of War Information (OWI) Collection housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: fsaLange00003