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Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.

Early life Born of second generation German immigrants on May 26, 1895, at 1041 Bloomfield Street, Hoboken, New Jersey,[1][2] Dorothea Lange was named Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn at birth. Her parents, Henrich Nutzhorn and Johanna Lange were prosperous and part of the middle class. Heinrich had connections to politics; this gave Lange insight in to the "pettiness and dirtiness" of politics at the time. Lange grew up in a family that valued art; her mother was a singer, her grandmother a seamstress. She dropped her middle name and assumed her mother's maiden name after her father abandoned the family when she was 12 years old, one of two traumatic incidents early in her life. There is speculation as to whether her father actually abandoned the family or if the separation was amicable, and abandonment was cited for financial reasons. After the separation Dorothea, her mother and brother went to live with Johanna's grandmother. The other traumatic incident she suffered was her contraction of polio at age seven which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp.[1][2] "It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," Lange once said of her altered gait. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."[3] Living with her grandmother put a strain on her relationship with her mother and eventually resulted in her establishing independence and moving away.

Career

New York

Dorothea's mother sent her to grade school in New York at PS 62 which she was able to attend because she gave a false address. After grade school she went on to Wadleigh High School for Girls [4] . She enrolled in New York College's Training for Teachers where she took a class taught by Columbia University's Clarence H. White. Lange considered herself to be a mediocre student and soon dropped out. However, it was what she saw on the streets of New York that inspired her to be a photographer. She did not yet have a camera but she knew she wanted to be a photographer. Lange took it upon herself to receive an education and she approached prestigious photographer, Arnold Genthe, for a job. His youngest employee, Genthe was impressed by Dorothea and took it upon himself to educate her. He gave her her first camera; it was the first camera she would ever use and she used it throughout her career. During this time she was also informally apprenticed to several other New York photography studios .

San Francisco

In 1918, she left New York with a female friend to travel the world, but was forced to end the trip in San Francisco due to a robbery and settled there, working as a photo finisher for Marsh and Company.[5] The following year she had opened a successful portrait studio.[2][6] She lived across the bay in Berkeley for the rest of her life. In 1920, she married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons, Daniel, born in 1925, and John, born in 1930.[7]

With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people, starting with “White Angel Breadline” which depicted a lone man turned away from the crowd in front of a soup kitchen run by a widow known as the White Angel,[8] captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

In December 1935, she divorced Dixon and married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.[7] Together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years – Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos.