Dorothea Lange

Documentary photography, in particular, can be fortified by words. Dorothea Lange, originally a portrait photographer, became an artist with a keen eye for the human condition and her collection of photographs told a powerful story of those that she photographed. Lange’s early work as a portrait photographer based in a studio in San Francisco changed when she was confronted with out of work men drifting about close by. She felt compelled to try and photograph what was going on. Her photograph “White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco, 1993” marked this turning point. It is an evocative photograph of a man in a beaten hat turned away from the others and holding a mug which he is no doubt hoping to fill with soup.  It is a photograph that tells a powerful story. Thereafter Lange was to focus on conditions of life on the street and elsewhere. 

Dorothea Lange wanted to use her photography to make a difference. When recollecting taking her iconic photo of “the migrant mother'“ she said:

“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.”

Shortly afterwards, Lange sends the photo to to an editor of a San Francisco newspaper and described the conditions of the camp. The editor informed the federal authorities who then urged the government to rush aid to the camp to prevent starvation.

Lange worked in collaboration with her husband, Paul Taylor, and together they produced a book called “An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion” (1939). Lange’s photographs accompanied texts drawn from field notes, folk song lyrics, newspaper excerpts, sociological observations and quotations from the sharecroppers, displaced people and migrant workers that Lange had been photographing. The photograph - Six tenant farmers without farms - was a remarkable achievement in getting together six largely independent farmers that had been displaced by changes in power farming. Lange must have used her considerable charm to get them to pose for her. I think there can be little doubt that despite Lange’s protestation that whatever she photographed she did not arrange her subjects, some of her photographs and what they reveal are influenced by the photographer’s directions. Not long after, her period photographing the Dust Bowl era, Lange was invited to photograph the Japanese American internment during the Second World War. Photographs of the patriotism of imigrant Japanese as depicted by the innocent enthusiasm of the young girl in One Nation Indivisible were in strong contrast with the shabby way those that called America their home were treated.

During the war Lange continued to document major economic and social changes when she photographed the booming shipyards of Richmond. The end of the war marked the end of an era of employment by the state for documentary photography. Illness plagued her and when she took up her camera again in the 1950s it was to record the more intimate and everyday features of a now booming California. Lange became more attracted to the urban scene, becoming more concerned with environmental issues and the undesirable side-effects of ‘progress’. Lange’s extensive photographic achievements have been hugely influential. What she tried to achieve are still at the foundation of documentary, Street and travel photography to this day. She was always interested in the adverse effects of socio-economic change and in doing so tried to follow three guiding principles:

“Whatever I photograph, I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second: a sense of place. Whatever I photograph, I try to picture as part of its surroundings, as having roots. Third: a sense of time. Whatever I photograph, I try to show as having its position in the past or in the present.”

For an interesting interpretation of how Lange’s photograph ‘The Migrant Mother’ came about see Jamie Windsor’s video:

HOW PORTRAITS LIE — What to be aware of in your portrait photography

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNKJOPx-ATI