Dorothea Lange (1895 to 1965) was an American photographer who left a successful San Francisco portrait studio to photograph people out of work, on the road and in the fields during the Great Depression. Working for a federal agency in the second half of the 1930s, she made Migrant Mother, a 1936 picture of a farm worker and her children in a California pea pickers’ camp that has been reproduced many times since, on postage stamps and magazine covers among other places.
Lange trained in New York. She studied photography with Clarence H. White and learned the trade in portrait studios, including that of Arnold Genthe. Genthe was a Pictorialist, and her first fifteen years of work were studio portraits of well off San Francisco families. What she turned against was that studio itself. When the Depression filled the streets outside it, she took the camera out to them. Later she taught beside Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Minor White, photographers whose subjects were very different from hers.
From Hoboken to a San Francisco portrait studio
She was born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey. At seven she contracted polio, which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp. Her father left the family when she was about twelve. She later dropped his surname and took Lange, her mother’s maiden name. The family moved to a poorer part of New York, and she attended Wadleigh High School for Girls.
In 1918 she set out from New York with a friend. They were robbed on the way and stopped in San Francisco, where Lange took a job as a finisher in a photographic supply shop. With money from a backer she opened her own portrait studio in about 1919. In 1920 she married the painter Maynard Dixon, and they had two sons. For roughly fifteen years her income came from portraits of the city’s social elite.
The breadline, the road and the government file
The change came with the Depression. In 1933 she photographed men waiting at a San Francisco soup kitchen run by Lois Jordan, a woman known as the White Angel. The picture, White Angel Breadline, drew the attention of local photographers and the press, and it led to work for the Resettlement Administration, the federal agency that was later renamed the Farm Security Administration.
In 1935 she divorced Dixon and married Paul Schuster Taylor, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. They worked as a team. Taylor interviewed people and gathered economic data, and Lange photographed and took notes. Between 1935 and 1939 she travelled widely for the agency, photographing sharecroppers, displaced farm families and migrant workers. The pictures were distributed to newspapers across the country. She and Taylor shaped the material into a book, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, published in 1939. This is documentary photography in its plainest sense: pictures made to record conditions and to get something done about them.
How does a set of pictures like this become one story? How to create a photo essay covers choosing a subject, shooting for variety and putting the frames in order.
In 1941 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first given to a woman for photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor she gave it up to work for the War Relocation Authority, documenting the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. She photographed families waiting with their luggage and identification tags, the temporary assembly centers, and Manzanar, the first permanent camp, in eastern California. The authorities impounded most of these photographs and they were not seen by the public during the war. They are held today by the National Archives, the Oakland Museum of California and the Bancroft Library.
Teaching, Aperture and the last assignments
In 1945 Ansel Adams invited Lange to teach in the new fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts. In 1952 she was one of the founders of the magazine Aperture. From 1954 she worked for Life magazine. One Life story followed Martin Pulich, a lawyer defending poor clients in court. Another, made with the photographer Pirkle Jones, recorded the last days of Monticello, a California town that was cleared for the damming of Putah Creek and the filling of Lake Berryessa. Life did not run it, and Lange gave it an entire issue of Aperture instead.
Her health was poor in her last decade. She died of esophageal cancer in San Francisco on October 11, 1965. The Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a retrospective, which she had helped to prepare, three months after her death. It was the museum’s first solo retrospective of a woman photographer.
How Lange made a picture carry a situation
The most useful record of her method is her own account of Migrant Mother. She had finished a month of work on migrant farm labour and was driving home when she passed the pea pickers’ camp at Nipomo. She kept going, then turned around and drove back. She used a Graflex camera loaded with 4×5 inch film, a large format negative that holds a great deal of detail but allows only one frame at a time. By her account, published in Popular Photography in 1960, she made five exposures in about ten minutes, moving closer each time and always from the same direction.
That is the teachable part. She did not circle the subject looking for angles. She kept one line of approach and reduced the distance, so each frame held less of the camp and more of the woman. The closest frame is the famous one. It fills the frame with four people and almost nothing else.
What does it mean to stay with one subject instead of taking a single frame and leaving? Working the scene explains the habit of making several deliberate versions of one picture.
She worked with words as well as pictures. On the road with Taylor she produced photographs together with written data, and An American Exodus set the two side by side. A reader of her pictures was meant to know where, when and under what conditions they were made.
How much should a photographer write down? How to write photo captions covers what a caption needs to say and what it should leave to the picture.
She also edited the print. On the Migrant Mother negative, the mother’s left thumb intruded in the foreground. Lange considered it a glaring defect and had it removed. The change is small, and it is a real example for anyone thinking about where to draw the line in retouching a documentary picture.
Last, she did not always ask. She recalled that she did not take the woman’s name or her history. The subject, Florence Owens Thompson, was identified only in 1978 by a reporter from the Modesto Bee. That gap between a photograph’s fame and its subject’s say in it is part of the picture’s history, and it belongs in any discussion of photography ethics.
Photographs to look for
- White Angel Breadline (1933). A crowd of unemployed men at a San Francisco soup kitchen, with one man turned away from the rest. This is the picture that took Lange out of the studio. Notice that a single figure facing the other way gives the crowd a centre.
- Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936). Florence Owens Thompson looks into the distance. Two children press their faces into her shoulders, and an infant lies in her lap. Because the children’s faces are hidden, hers is the only one to read.
- The other Nipomo frames (1936). The other exposures from the camp show the family from farther back. The Library of Congress notes that the order in which they were taken cannot be fixed from the negative numbers. Seen together they are a lesson in how a picture is found by moving.
- Pledge of allegiance, Weill public school, San Francisco (April 1942). Schoolchildren pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before Japanese American families were removed from the city. The meaning comes from the date as much as from the frame.
- Children of the Mochida family, Hayward, California (May 8, 1942). Made for the War Relocation Authority as the family waited for evacuation. It is one of the photographs from the body of work that was impounded during the war.
- Death of a Valley (mid 1950s, with Pirkle Jones). The record of Monticello before it was flooded. Look at it as a sequence about one place over a limited time, published as a complete issue of Aperture.
Want to photograph a person in the place that explains them? Environmental portrait photography covers how setting, distance and light tell the viewer who someone is.
Try this: five frames, one direction
This takes about fifteen minutes with a camera or a phone. Ask someone you know who is busy with something, such as cooking, repairing or gardening, if you may photograph them.
- Do not zoom. Use one focal length for the whole exercise.
- Stand far enough back to show the person and the whole space they are in. Make one frame.
- Take two or three steps forward along the same line and make a second frame. Do not move sideways.
- Repeat until you have exactly five frames. The fifth should hold the person and almost nothing else.
- Write one sentence for the set: who, where, when and what was happening.
Look at the five in order. Decide which frame says most about the situation and which says most about the person. They are often not the same frame.
Questions people ask about Dorothea Lange
Who is the woman in Migrant Mother?
She was Florence Owens Thompson, who was 32 when Lange photographed her in March 1936 at a pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. Lange did not record her name. Thompson was identified in 1978 by a journalist from the Modesto Bee.
What camera did Dorothea Lange use?
The Migrant Mother series was made with a Graflex camera on 4×5 inch film negatives, according to the Library of Congress. A sheet of film that size records fine detail, and each exposure has to be made one at a time.
Who did Dorothea Lange work for?
She ran her own portrait studio in San Francisco from about 1919. From 1935 she photographed for the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration. In 1942 she worked for the War Relocation Authority, and from 1954 she photographed for Life magazine.
Why were her internment photographs not seen during the war?
The War Relocation Authority hired her to document the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast in 1942. The authorities impounded most of the photographs, so the public did not see them while the war lasted.
Lange is one of the photographers in the A to Z of photographers, and she is quoted on the photography quotes page.