Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895. In her late teens and early twenties she worked with Arnold Genthe in his New York portrait studio and studied photography at Columbia with Clarence White. In 1918 she left New York to travel and in 1919 settled in San Francisco, where she opened a photography studio.
With the coming of the Depression, Dorothea Lange began to photograph San Francisco's dispossessed. A 1934 exhibition of her work brought Dorothea Lange to the attention of Paul Taylor, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. In early 1935 Lange and Taylor documented the plight of migrant farm workers for the California Emergency Relief Administration. The couple was married later that year.
Based on Dorothea Lange's migrant photographs, Roy Stryker offered her a job with the New Deal's Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration. Stryker was putting together a team of photographers to document the impact of the Depression on the nation's rural poor, particularly those from the drought-stricken region known as the "Dust Bowl." Although most of Lange's FSA work was based out of California, she traveled and photographed in Arkansas on several occasions.
There is no pretense of objectivity in Dorothea Lange photographs. Her sympathy is obviously with her subjects. "The important thing is not the photograph," she wrote, "but the consequence of seeing the photograph." For her photography was all about seeing. "One should use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind," she would later write. "To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it."
Learn about other Arkansas photographers, such as Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee.
