Dorothea Lange. American photographer

Transcription

1 Dorothea Lange American photographer

2 Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depressionera work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange s photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. Lange s 1936, Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson

3 Synopsis During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1941, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship. She was the first female recipient.

4 White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco (1933)

5 Early Years From 1914 to 1917 she attended the New York Training School for Teachers and there decided to become a photographer, partly influenced by visits to the photographer Arnold Genthe to 1918 she attended a photography course run by Clarence H. White at Columbia University, NY. Lange moved to San Francisco. 1918, and in 1919 she set up a successful portrait studio where she took works such as Clayburgh Children, San Francisco (1924; Oakland, CA, Mus.). late 1920s she became dissatisfied with studio work and experimented with landscape and plant photography

6 Dorothea Lange Clayburgh Children, San Francisco (1924; Oakland, CA, Mus.). Untitled (ca Oakland, CA, Mus.).

7 Grayson, San Joaquin Valley, California 1938 Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities. - Dorothea Lange

8 Change of Focus By 1918, Lange was living in San Francisco and soon running a successful portrait studio. With her husband, muralist Maynard Dixon, she had two sons and settled into the comfortable middle-class life she d known as a child. Lange s first real taste of documentary photography came in the 1920s when she traveled around the Southwest with Dixon, mostly photographing Native Americans. With the onslaught of the Great Depression in the 1930s, she trained her camera on what she started to see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes and breadlines

9 Dust Bowl Farm Photographer: Dorothea Lange June, 1938 Library of Congress description: "Coldwater District, north of Dalhart, Texas. This house is occupied; most of the houses in this district have been abandoned

10 Change of Focus In the early 1930s, Lange, mired in an unhappy marriage, met Paul Taylor, a university professor and labor economist. Their attraction was immediate, and by 1935, both had left their respective spouses to be with each other. Over the next five years, the couple traveled extensively together, documenting the rural hardship they encountered for the Farm Security Administration, established by the U.S. Agriculture Department. Taylor wrote reports, and Lange photographed the people they met. This body of work included Lange s most well-known portrait, Migrant Mother, an iconic image from this period that gently and beautifully captured the hardship and pain of what so many Americans were experiencingthe work now hangs in the Library of Congress.

11 Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California(1936)

12 Resettlement Administration Stock Market crash of 1929 Lange decided to look for subjects outside her studio. Turning to the effects of the economic decline she took photographs such as General Strike, San Francisco (1934; Oakland, CA, Mus.) She had her first one-woman show at the Brockhurst Studio of Willard Van Dyke in Oakland, CA Same year met the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, under whom she worked for the California State Emergency Relief Administration in Later that year she transferred to the Resettlement Administration, set up to deal with the problem of the migration of agricultural workers. She continued to work for this body, through its various transformations (including its time as the Farm Security Administration), until 1942

13 Damaged Child, Shacktown, Elm Grove, Oklahoma ( 1936)

14 Political Signs, Waco, Texas (1938)

15 Daughter of Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner Living in American River Camp near Sacramento, California (1936) Lange's mature work proved that works of art and documents are not mutually exclusive, and that they can combine to produce beautiful, moving, and campaigning images. Her use of innovative techniques also proved that modernist art need not only convey the private feelings of the artist, but could also be put in the services of popular journalism.

16 Ex-Tenant Farmer on Relief Grant in the Imperial Valley, California (1937)

17 Jobless on the Edge of a Peafield, Imperial Valley, California 1937

18 Ex-Slave with Long Memory, Alabama 1937 The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. - Dorothea Lange - quoted in: Los Angeles Times (13 Aug. 1978).

19 In 1939, in collaboration with Taylor, who provided the text, she published An American Exodus, which dealt with the same social problems. In 1941 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and this allowed her to take a series of photographs of religious groups in the USA, such as those of the Amish people (1941; Oakland, CA, Mus.).

20 An American Exodus Lange, Dorothea. Homeless family, tenant farmers from: An American Exodus by Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor Photograph. Artstor. University of Califonia, San Diego.

21 An American Exodus Lange, Dorothea. from: An American Exodus by Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor Photograph. Artstor. University of Califonia, San Diego.

22 Crossroads Store, Alabama 1937

23 Street Demonstration, San Francisco 1938 This benefit of seeing...can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image...the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate. - Dorothea Lange

24 J.R. Butler, President of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, Memphis, Tennessee Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. - Dorothea Lange

25 Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley Town, California

26 Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley Town, California 1938 Seen from slightly below, the woman in this photograph has become a monumental figure, set against the open sky and the unforgiving earth. Her gesture is full of suffering but tells us nothing specific about her life or travails. Yet the sunlight falls on the palpable flesh of a person and on the worn cloth of her shift. The picture exemplifies Lange's exceptional talent for making the leap from concrete fact to arching symbol without leaving reality behind. She made it for the Farm Security Administration, a government agency whose photographic unit was charged with documenting the plight of the rural poor in the 1930s. Her work created a lasting image of the Great Depression. It also deepened the link between the descriptive style of documentary photography and the ideal of social engagement, becoming a touchstone for photographers who felt that their work should not only record social conditions but try to persuade people to improve them.

27 Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas 1938

28 Ma Burnham, Conroy, Arkansas 1938

29 The Road West, New Mexico 1938

30 Kern County, California 1938

31 Migrant Mother Dorothea Lange s Migrant Mother was photographed in February 1936 in a pea pickers camp in Nipomo, California, while on assignment as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration (RA), which soon would become the better-known Farm Security Administration (FSA). As Lange told the story years later, the decision to stop at the pea picker s camp was fortuitous. She was driving home after a month in the field when she happened upon a sign identifying the camp. She tried to ignore the sign and drive on, but after twenty miles she was compelled to return to the camp, following instinct, not reason. She shot six photographs in a very short period of time of the woman and members of her family, starting at a distance and working her way closer and closer after the fashion of a portrait photographer. An excerpt from No Caption Needed Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites

32 Migrant Mother Her photos first appeared in the San Francisco News on March 10, 1936, as part of a story demanding relief for the starving pea pickers. The feature was a success: relief was organized, and there is no record of death by starvation. This story of the photo s origin and impact is, of course, a bit too good. Every icon acquires a standard narrative and often others as well. The standard narrative includes a myth of origin, a tale of public uptake or impact, and a quest for the actual people in the picture to provide closure for the larger social drama captured by the image. In this case, the photo s origin is due to serendipity, not routine or craft. There is no mention of Lange s government subsidy nor of the fact that the photo was retouched to remove the woman s thumb in the lower right corner. Most tellingly, it slides over the fact that the iconic photo was not actually shown in the San Francisco News until the day following the original story. Iconic photos acquire mythic narratives: Lange becomes a poetic vehicle for the operation of historical forces; by mobilizing public opinion, the photographer provides the impetus to collective action. The star illustration of moving somebody to do something is Migrant Mother.

33 Delta Cooperative Farm, Hillhouse, Mississippi, July 4, 1936 (Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration)

34 Dorothea Lange Japanese internment camps For her works, Lange was given the Guggenheim Fellowship Award in During World War II, Lange recorded various assignments like the relocation of Japanese Americans. Her photos were impounded by the Army due to their critical nature. These days her photographs are stored at the University of California, Berkeley. After the war, Lange taught at the California School of Fine Arts and founded a photographic publication called Aperture. On October 1965, Lange died from esophageal cancer.

35 Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration American children reciting the pledge of allegiance, 1942.) US Government image. - Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress, LC-USZ , "San Francisco, Calif., April Children of the Weill public school, from the so-called international settlement, shown in a flag pledge ceremony. Some of them are evacuees of Japanese ancestry who will be housed in War relocation authority centers for the duration." /

36 Dorothea Lange's Documentary Photographs