Nicholas Martinez

11/13/18
7th
Dorothea Lange was born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. Educated at

Columbia University, learned photography in New York, moved to San Francisco, and with the

onset of the Great Depression, became one of the most famous and influential documentary

photographers, best known for her Farm Security Administration photographs of the migrant

farm workers in California. One of those photographs, known as "Migrant Mother" is perhaps

the most iconic photograph of that era. During World War II she documented the internment of

Japanese Americans. In the 1940s she taught at the California School of Fine Arts. In 1952 she

co-founded the photo magazine, "Aperture." The Depression ended her photography business. In

1931 she sent her sons to boarding school and lived separately from her husband, giving up their

home while they each lived in their respective studios. She began photographing the effects of

the Depression on people. She exhibited her photographs with the help of Willard Van Dyke and

Roger Sturtevant. Her 1933 "White Angel Breadline" is one of the most famous of her

photographs from this period. Lange's photographs were also used to illustrate the sociology and

economics work on the Depression by University of California's Paul S. Taylor. He used her

work to back up grant requests for food and camps for the many Depression and Dust Bowl

refugees coming to California. In 1935, Lange divorced Maynard Dixon and married Taylor. In

1945, she began working for Life magazine. Her features included the 1954 "Three Mormon

Towns" and the 1955 "The Irish Country People." Plagued by illness from about 1940, she was

diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1964. Dorothea Lange succumbed to the cancer in 1965. Her

last published photo essay was The American Country Woman. A retrospective of her work was

exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966.

Nicholas Martinez
11/13/18
7th