LANGE, DOROTHEA

born May 26, 1895, Hoboken, N.J., U.S. died Oct. 11, 1965, San Francisco, Calif. American documentary photographer whose studies in the 1930s of the victims of the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photographers. Lange studied photography at Columbia University under Clarence White, a member of the group of photographers called the Photo-Secession. At the age of 20, she decided to travel around the world, earning money as she went by selling her photographs. She got as far as San Francisco before her money ran out, settled there, and opened a portrait studio in 1916. There her reputation as an innovator grew rapidly. During the Great Depression, Lange sought to broaden the dimensions of her work by photographing the homeless men who wandered the streets. Such pictures as White Angel Breadline (1932), showing the hopeless condition of these men, received immediate recognition from the photographers of Group f.64 and led to Lange's being hired by the federal Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration) to bring the conditions of the poor to public attention. Her photographs of migrant workers, with whom she lived for some time, were captioned with the words of the workers themselves and were so effective that California established camps for the migrants. Lange's first exhibition was held in 1934, and thereafter her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer was firmly established. Her most famous portrait, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), hangs in the Library of Congress. In 1939 she published a collection of her photographs in the book An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Two years later she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she gave up, however, after the attack on Pearl Harbor so that she could record the mass evacuation of Japanese-Americans to detention camps. After World War II, she did a number of photo-essays, including Mormon Villages and The Irish Countryman, for Life magazine. Even during long periods of inactivity because of illness, her reputation continued to rise. The year after her death in 1965, she was honoured by a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.