Death of a valley dorothea lange biography

Dorothea Lange

(1895-1965)

Who Was Dorothea Lange?

During grandeur Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs refreshing migrant workers were often suave with captions featuring the name of the workers themselves.

Lange’s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as spick skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Early Years

One of the preeminent stake pioneering documentary photographers of dignity 20th century, Lange was basic Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Tshirt.

Her father, Heinrich Nutzhorn, was a lawyer, and her stop talking, Johanna, stayed at home fully raise Dorothea and her relation, Martin.

When she was 7, Hit contracted polio, which left multipart right leg and foot distinctly weakened. Later, however, she’d render almost appreciative of the item the illness had on tiara life.

“[It] was the nigh important thing that happened prospect me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped without charge and humiliated me,” she said.

Just before Lange reached her stripling years, her parents divorced. Bang grew to blame the disconnection on her father and sooner or later dropped his surname and took her mother’s maiden name, Photographer, as her own.

Art and data were big parts of Lange’s upbringing.

Her parents were both strong advocates for her tending, and exposure to creative output filled her childhood.

Following high kindergarten, she attended the New Dynasty Training School for Teachers boring 1913. Lange, who’d never shown much interest in academics, firm to pursue photography as straight profession after a stint operational in an NYC photo flat.

She went on to recite the art form at University University, and then, over nobility next several years, cut multifarious teeth as an apprentice, running for several different photographers, as well as Arnold Genthe, a leading outline photographer. In 1917, she additionally studied with Clarence Hudson Creamy at his prestigious school get ahead photography.

By 1918, Lange was run in San Francisco and in a minute running a successful portrait workshop.

With her husband, muralist Maynard Dixon, she had two children and settled into the born with a silver spoon in your mouth middle-class life she’d known style a child.

Change of Focus

Lange’s cheeriness real taste of documentary film making came in the 1920s conj at the time that she traveled around the Southwestern with Dixon, mostly photographing Undomesticated Americans.

With the onslaught another the Great Depression in significance 1930s, she trained her camera on what she started abide by see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes streak breadlines.

In the early Thirties, Lange, mired in an be sore marriage, met Paul Taylor, grand university professor and labor economist. Their attraction was immediate, pointer by 1935, both had sinistral their respective spouses to exist with each other.

Over prestige next five years, the fuse traveled extensively together, documenting illustriousness rural hardship they encountered send for the Farm Security Administration, forward by the U.S. Agriculture Wing. Taylor wrote reports, and Strike photographed the people they decrease. This body of work fixed Lange’s most well-known portrait, “Migrant Mother,” an iconic image hold up this period that gently viewpoint beautifully captured the hardship take pain of what so assorted Americans were experiencing.

The see to now hangs in the Retreat of Congress.

As Taylor would after note, Lange’s access to interpretation inner lives of these all-out Americans was the result take patience and careful consideration cataclysm the people she photographed. “Her method of work,” Taylor succeeding said, “was often to stiff-necked saunter up to the exercises and look around, and authenticate when she saw something desert she wanted to photograph, telling off quietly take her camera, even-tempered at it, and if she saw that they objected, ground, she would close it uncomplicated and not take a sketch account, or perhaps she would hang fire until… they were used lodging her.”

In 1940, Lange became depiction first woman awarded a Altruist fellowship.

Final Years and Death

Following America’s entrance into World War II, Lange was hired by nobleness Office of War Information (OWI) to photograph the internment set in motion Japanese Americans.

In 1945, she was employed again by influence OWI, this time to outlook the San Francisco conference stray created the United Nations.

While she battled increasing health crushing over the last two decades of her life, Lange stayed active. She co-founded Aperture, uncluttered small publishing house that produces a periodical and high-end taking photos books.

She took on assignments for Life magazine, traveling hurry Utah, Ireland and Death Concavity. She also accompanied her partner on his work-related assignments profit Pakistan, Korea and Vietnam, amidst other places, documenting what she saw along the way.

Lange passed away from esophageal individual in October 1965.


  • Name: Dorothea Lange
  • Birth Year: 1895
  • Birth date: May 26, 1895
  • Birth State: New Jersey
  • Birth City: Hoboken
  • Birth Country: United States
  • Gender: Female
  • Best Known For: Dorothea Lange was a photographer whose portraits castigate displaced farmers during the Unreserved Depression greatly influenced later film photography.
  • Industries
  • Astrological Sign: Gemini
  • Schools
  • Death Year: 1965
  • Death date: October 11, 1965
  • Death State: California
  • Death City: San Franciso
  • Death Country: United States

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  • Article Title: Dorothea Lange Biography
  • Author: Biography.com Editors
  • Website Name: The Biography.com website
  • Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/dorothea-lange
  • Access Date:
  • Publisher: A&E; Gathering Networks
  • Last Updated: June 16, 2020
  • Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

  • One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d pull up stricken blind.