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DOROTHEA LANGE

"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."

The photojournalist and documentary photographer, Dorothea Lange (b. 1895) strived to capture the rural poverty of America during the Depression-era. She was most notable for her work during the Depression-era for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Dorothea Lange’s photographs have heavily humanised the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. 

 

Dorothea Lange has been notable for her depression-era photography, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship of Creative Arts, US & Canada Award for her photograph, ‘Migrant Mother’ and her achievement in photography. However, during this time was the attack on Pearl Harbour, where Lange had repudiated the prestigious award to photograph the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, covering the internment of Japanese-Americans and their following incarceration. Lange’s photos have been 

 

Dorothea Lange was born in 1895, where she graduated from the Wadleigh High School for Girls and studied at the New York Training School for Teachers but later desired to pursue photography instead at Columbia University. Art and literature were a significant part of Lange’s childhood as both of her parents were strong advocates for her education. Lange had a vivid exposure of creative works during her childhood as well. During Lange’s childhood, she had encountered two traumatic experiences in her life, one that would stay with her forever, and one that would change her life. Lange’s father had abandoned her family when she was only quite young, which resulted in her dropping her middle name, Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn, and had replaced it with Dorothea Lange. Her other traumatic experience was the illness of polio, which had weakened her right leg and further disadvantaging her in the future from pursuing photography.   

 

During the time of the Great Depression, Lange manoeuvred from studio photography to street photography, capturing and studying unemployed and homeless people, starting with White Angel Breadline. Following her studies on the street, Lange began working with the Farm Security Administration. Later on in Lange’s life, she remarried another man, documenting rural poverty, the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant labourers with him. 

 

One of the many influences for Lange’s photography was the historical era of rural poverty. Lange had started street photography in the 1920s, after her works in studio photography. Her career developed when the severe economic Great Depression of the 1930s had hit America, which created a political opening for expanding and deepening American democracy. 

 

Lange was influenced by Consuelo Kanaga, a radical photojournalist that was friends with Lange when they were both living in San Francisco. Consuelo Kanaga is best known for her work with African Americans, but also the style of her photography, which focuses on her subject’s facial expressions. Lange's infuences is depicted when Consuelo Kananga's 'Mother with Children in New York' (1922) is compared with Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother' (1936). It is evident that Lange's photograph is similar to Kanaga's in terms of subject and the indirect gazing. 

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From her experiences of street photography, Dorothea Lange also gained inspiration from people living their daily lives, where she would encompass a moment in time and capture it without any background knowledge of her subject or little interaction. 

 

Despite the miseries and fear it engendered, the Depression created a moment of idealism, imagination, and unity in Americans' hopes for their country. No photographer of the time, perhaps no artist of the time, did more than Lange to advance this democratic vision. Her photographs enlarged the popular understanding of who Americans were, providing a more democratic visual representation of the nation.

 

Lange’s practice in many of her photos, if not all, are all naturalistic, where she controls the frame of the shot, but not controlling what her subjects are doing. Lange’s method of photographing is very vivid and realistic in terms of natural lighting and capturing the specific moment in time. Throughout the time-frame of Lange’s work, she often used a Graflex Series D camera to capture her subjects during the Depression era. Lange’s photography remains powerful due to her informative style of photography, where her technique is to remain neutral and detached, with its aesthetic uninterrupted by any involvement on Lange’s part. Between Lange and her subjects, there was no emotional distance. As seen in Migrant Mother, the detachment from the Lange and Florence Owen Thompson makes the photograph so powerful due to the neutrality of Lange’s style of photography.

 

Lange’s use of gazing is very effective, where most of her subjects’ gazes are indirect gazes. Indirect gazing allows the audience to emotionally attach themselves to the subject without feeling scrutinised by the subject. Lange’s use of gazing is seen in many of her works, but particularly in Ditched, Stranded and Stalled, where the subject it unaware of his photo being taken, but the gaze establishes an atmosphere of security for the audience as the gaze is not as powerful as it would be if it was looking straight at the lens of the camera. 

 

Much like her influences, Lange procured her beliefs and values from her subjects and what she was attempting to photograph. Lange has shaped her beliefs and values through her experiences, which are then manifested in her photography. In many of Lange’s works, her photos are taken in places of rural poverty, which demands a sense of courage and dauntlessness, which is evident with Lange. One of Lange’s beliefs is that “it is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque,” meaning Lange needs to photograph the subject in depth rather than photograph something that is already aesthetic. Another belief that Lange follows is the belief of capturing the subject in a specific moment in time. This belief is exemplified in her photo ‘Ditched, Stalled and Stranded’, where the candid expression of plight is evident on the subject’s face. The single expression on his face was adequate to show how a single moment in time can encompass Lange’s belief. Lange decided to use her camera not only to capture the likenesses of her subjects, but also to tell their stories. 

 

The contextual values during the 1920s-1930s was a society of rural poverty, which resulted in depression of much of the population. From Lange’s influences and her choice in subjects to photograph, it is evident that Lange’s intention was to study the consequences of rural poverty and the economy downfall within humanity. With the documentation of the historical issue, the Great Depression in photography by Dorothea Lange, there is no subjective or objective viewpoint that is being generated. The common attitudes that Lange has photographed in many, if not all, of her works is the feeling of despondency and depression, as the hardships that the subjects were encountering were execrable.

 

The audience for Dorothea Lange’s photography is majorly ideological as Lange photographs the Depression-era. Much of Lange’s photography had raised awareness of her as a photographer, but also raised awareness of the consequences of the Depression. Companies such as the Farm Security Administration had seen her work and recruited her to work for them. Lange’s works were not intentionally photographed for society during the 1930s, but for people in the future, to perceive what life was like during the Great Depression. Much of her audience did not see her photographs until decades later. Lange’s audience are seen to be ideologically sympathetic to her photographs as she had documented the Depression-era. 

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