Photographer Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange
Photographer Dorothea Lange
“You know there are moments such as these when time stands still...”
― Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange is a photographer whose portraits of peasants who lost during the Great Depression had a great influence on the subsequent photography documentation.
During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange was photographed with unemployed men traveling through the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers often receive legends in the words of the workers themselves. The first exhibition of Lange, held in 1934, has established her reputation as a specialized documentary photographer. In 1940, he received the scholarship of the Guggenheim.
First year
One of the most famous and pioneer photographers in the 20th century, Dorothea Lange was born Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. His father, Heinrich Nutzhorn, was a lawyer, and his mother, Johanna, remained at home to raise Dorothea and his brother Martin.
When she was 7 years old, Dorothea contracted polio, leaving his feet and paw foot rights. However, he was grateful for the effects of his life. "[It was] the most important thing that happened to me, and gave me shape, guided me, taught me, helped me and humiliated me," he said.
Before Dorothea came to her adolescence, her parents divorced. Dorothea began to blame her father for separation and, ultimately, her last name dropped and took her mother's name, Lange, as herself.
Art and literature are a great part of Lange's education. Her parents strongly advocate her education and exposure to creative activities her childhood.
After high school, he attended the New York Training School for Teachers in 1913. Lange, who never showed much interest in academics, decided to pursue photography as a profession after a time in a studio photographs in New York. He continued studying the art form at Columbia University, and then, over the next few years, became a beginner, working for many different photographers, including Arnold Genthe, a well-known photographer portrait. In 1917, he also studied Clarence Hudson White in his prestigious school of study.
In 1918, Lange lived in San Francisco and soon directed a successful study of portraits. With her husband, muralist Maynard Dixon, she had two children and lived in a comfortable middle-class life she had known as a child.
Changing Focus
The first real taste of Lange's photography came in the 1920s when he traveled southwest with Dixon, which took most of the Native Americans. Due to the violent attack on the Great Depression in 1930, he used his camera as he began to see in his own neighborhoods in San Francisco: work strikes and support lines.
In the early 1930s, Lange, in a lonely marriage, was known to Paul Taylor, a professor of university and labor economics. Their attraction was immediate, and in 1935 both their spouses both left.
Within the next five years, the couple traveled thoroughly, documenting the farm hardships they experienced for the Agricultural Supervision Administration, established by the US Department of Agriculture. Taylor wrote reports and photographed Lange with the people they met. This body of work includes Lange's best-known image, "Migrant Mother," an iconic picture of this time acquired in a smooth and beautiful way of the hardships and pains of so many Americans. The work is now hanging in the Library of Congress.
As Taylor can see later, Lange's access to the inner life of struggling Americans is a result of patience and careful consideration of the people who photographed. "His way of work," Taylor said in the end, "often walks around the people and look around, and then, when he sees something he wants to get, he takes his camera silently, looked at it and saw that they were opposed, why, he would close it and not take a picture, or maybe wait until ... they were used here. "
n 1940, Lange became the first woman to receive a scholarship to the Guggenheim.
Following the invasion of America in World War II, Lange was hired by the Office of War Information (OWI) to photograph the internment of Japanese Americans.
In 1945, he was re-employed by OWI, this time to document the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations.
As he fought with increasing health problems over the last two decades of his life, Lange remained active. He is the founder of Aperture, a small publishing house that produces periodical and high-end photography books. She took the homework assignments for Life magazine, traveling through Utah, Ireland and Death Valley. She also accompanies her spouse with work-related tasks in Pakistan, Korea and Vietnam, among other places, documenting what he saw on the road.
Lange passed away from esophageal cancer in October 1965.
While the occasional Lange disappointed that his work did not always provoke society to correct the injustices he has documented, his studies remain and influences the generations of documentary photographers.
Lessons I Learned from Dorothea Lange Photography
Learn how to see
Work the theme to exhaustion
A photograph is a self-portrait
“That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.”
― Dorothea Lange
