She is relevent for her inclusion of hands in many of her pictures
I ordered her biography and another small book called Phaidon 55 Dorothea Lange.
Interestingly, she was also a friend and contempory of Imogen Cunningham who Ruth has studied and mentioned to me. Cunningham's images of artistic nudes and plant forms are next on my list for study, but Lange deserves in depth attention first. The were part of the San Fransisco art scene of the 1930s.
Women photographers of that time were preoccupied with how to combine career and artistic development with keeping men happy and taking care of children, or living without husbands which some found equally hard. - A Life Beyond Limits.
Destitute pea pickers living in tent in migrant camp. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California. February 1936
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.
This is Lange's most famous picture and was taken as one of a series of images when she worked for the Farm Security Administration. Controversy also arose over this image as it was retouched in the darkroom to exclude a distracting thumb in the lower right corner.She felt her life had been shaped by to major incidents, the onset of Polio at age 7 and the desertion of her father five years later. The family moved in with her maternal grandmother, a cultured perfectionist who drank heavily and had an explosive temper who dominated her mother. Dorthea was determined not to be a passive woman.
Originally she worked as a professional portrait photographer, picturing some of the wealthiest and most prominent families in San Fransisco, but during the depths of the depression in 1933 she took to the streets with her camera. Her emotional life was also falling apart and her marriage to the eminent painter Maynard Dixon was on the rocks. Her photography underwent a shift as she began to talk to the people she photographed. She divorced Dixon and eventually remarried Paul Taylor an agricultural economist. Through travelling with him during his field research she came into contact with those most affected by the depression, drought and increasing mechanisation of farming.
In 1935 she joined the staff of the State Emergency Relief Administration and was hired to photograph farm labourers.Through this work she became a staff photographer for the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration. The FSA provided an extensive record of the transformation of American agriculture and the migration of Americans, driven from their land by the tractor and the Dust Bowl. from Phaidon 55.
July 1937. "Sharecropper family near Hazlehurst, Georgia." Nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration.
November 1936. "American River camp, Sacramento, California. Destitute family. Five children, aged two to seventeen years." Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration.
October 1939. "Mr. and Mrs. Wardlaw at entrance to their dugout basement home.
Dead Ox Flat, Malheur County, Oregon.
" Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration.
June 1938. Outskirts of El Paso, Texas. "Young Negro wife cooking breakfast. 'Do you suppose I'd be out on the highway cooking my steak if I had it good at home?' Occupations: hotel maid, cook, laundress." Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration.
In 1941 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and could have led an easy life, but after the attack on Pearl Harbour she gave it up to work for the War Relocation Authority covering the rounding up and internment of the mistrusted American Japanese.
Her images were so obviously critical of the way these people had been treated that they were confiscated by the army.
In 1945, Lange was invited by Ansel Adams to accept a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). Imogen Cunningham and Minor White joined as well. She was co founder of the magasine Aperture.
She had various health problems throughout her life related to her childhood illness, and died at the age of 70 from oesophageal cancer.
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