Dorothea Lange, dignity in the crisis
« American photographer (1895-1965), who showed a different America during the Great Depression. »
Stricken with polio at seven, which left her with a limp, Dorothea Lange opened a portrait studio in San Francisco in the 1920s. The Crash of 1929 pushed her into the street. White Angel Breadline (1933) marked the turning point: photography as social witness rather than commission.
Hired by the Farm Security Administration in 1935, she travelled California and Oklahoma. Migrant Mother (1936) — Florence Owens Thompson and her children outside a tent — became the absolute icon of the Depression. Lange carefully recorded her subjects' words; her captions are worth her images.
During World War II she documented the internment of Japanese Americans — work so troubling to the authorities that it remained classified until 2006. With Walker Evans, she founded the American documentary canon: showing poverty without degrading it.