Born May 26, 1895 in New Jersey, Dorothea Lange became a pioneer of Depression era photography, giving a real face to the plight of thousands of displaced Americans. Her photos still hang on the walls of America’s greatest museums, a testament to her skill as a photographer and the life she chose to live.

Having studied photography at Columbia University, Lange began her career as a portrait photographer in New York. Itchy feet would make her move quickly and her nation wide travel shows in all of her works. She was in San Francisco when the Depression began to close its grip tightly around the plain states and as the dust bowl grew, she made her way into its depth and began shooting.

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”
- Dorothea Lange

In 1935, the government had introduced a number of programs to provide employment for the disposed including many of the nation’s artists. Lange was hired by the Farm Security Administration to go out into the countryside and take pictures of the people and places struck by the Dustbowl, the high unemployment and indeed the rampant starvation of the period. Her pictures are poignant black and white studies that, as Lange liked to say “let you see without the camera.”

In her time, Lange married a painter and an economist exemplifying her fascination with both art and the realities of the world. A depiction of a homeless mother with her two small children wondering if the husband would ever return, her pictures of broken down cars discarded on the trail west, picket lines and bread lines, migrant workers, ruined homesteaders, immigrants, farmers, and every kind of human condition was the subject of her photography. Lange was a part of the documentary film movement that was taken place in America during the 30s when the dreams of the 20s had fallen flat and the nation became a land of realists.

After the Depression, Lange moved on to photographing World War II on the home front. Her subjects went from breadline to internment camp and the faces of migrant farmers were replaced with interred Japanese Americans. Later she traveled to Ireland and Vietnam and her work appeared on the cover of “LIFE” magazine several times. In her final years she taught photography at the California School of Fine Arts and co-founded the photography magazine “Aperture.” Lange passed away after long illness in October of 1965.

One of my favorite Americans will always be Dorothea Lange. She used the camera lens to document real American life on a large scale during a time when the country suffered greatly. Her pictures continue to grace the pages of school books that discuss the depression as her blunt earthy portrayals of life during that era remain unsurpassed by government statistics or even newspaper headlines. Rockwell has his place in depicting the different aspects of American culture but Lange will always remain for me a pioneer of documentary art and a great example as photography as advocate for the people.

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