Dorothea Lange
The sufferings of migrant workers during the years of the Great Depression are not invisible today: they have a face that survives in photographs, some of the greatest of which were taken by Dorothea Lange. Born in New Jersey in 1895, Lange had decided to become a photographer by the age of 18. Two years later, having learned her craft in New York City, Lange moved West, joined the San Francisco Camera Club, and established a successful studio photography practice. When the economic crash of 1929 left people across the land unemployed and homeless, Lange abandoned the studio for the streets, documenting the plight of Americans in California. She found a partner and soulmate in Paul Schuster Taylor, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who provided a textual narrative to accompany her images. In turn, both found support from the Roosevelt Administration's New Deal policies, and in particular from Roy Stryker. Stryker assembled a team of distinguished photographers to document the situation of the rural poor and show how they were aided by the Administration's policies. In 1941, she turned her lens from those who were helped by the Roosevelt Administration to those who were harmed by it, documenting the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps. Most of these photographs, while powerful, did not see the light of day until 1972: the Army censored them as being too sympathetic to the camp inmates. After the war, she co-founded the fine art photography magazine Aperture with Ansel Adams and other leading photographers. She also traveled abroad in this period, documenting the lives of people in Ireland, Egypt, Vietnam, and Latin America. Her work gained even greater recognition in these years, with her photographs included in shows such as the seminal 1952 "Family of Man", and the ultimate accolade, a 1966 retrospective in New York's MoMA. Unfortunately, Lange did not live to see this final show: shortly after selecting the photographs to be included in the retrospective, an inoperable esophageal cancer took her life on October 11, 1965.
