Artist - photographer; outlining their practice

 

“Her method of work was often to just saunter up to the people and look around, and then when she saw something that she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera, look at it, and if she saw that they objected, why, she would close it up and not take a photograph, or perhaps she would wait until… they were used to her.”

 

Dorothea Lange was a social documentary photographer

 

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. 

 

Dorothea Lange’s work helped to significantly develop the field of social documentary photography, which sought to use photographs to influence politics and encourage social change.

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”

 “To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.”

“It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.”

 

Main concepts, values, ideas:

Poverty

Consequences of the Great Depression

Exploitation

Unemployment

Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. Lange mostly photographed the native americans during the 1920s, where she trained her camera to see what she started to see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes and breadlines. 

 

Influenced by Consuelo Kanaga, a radical photojournalist.   

  

Two traumatic experiences in her life;

Her father abandoned her family and hence she chose to drop her middle name

Being attacked by polio, which made her limp because of a weakened right leg

Education:

Studied teaching before moving into photography 

Wadleigh High School

Columbia University for photography 

 

Background:

Two traumatic experiences in her life;

Her father abandoned her family and hence she chose to drop her middle name

Being attacked by polio, which made her limp because of a weakened right leg

Lived during the Great Depression era of poverty, unemployment, crash of wall street 

Started her career doing studio photography 

Moved into street and rural poverty photography 

Migrant mother won her the Guggenheim Fellowship prize

First woman to ever win Guggenheim award

- Co-founded Aperature (magazine company)

Lange’s works are now exhibited at the Library of Congress

 

World - Identifying events and issues 

Contextual values are times during the Great Depression

World was depressed, especially the United States as the economy had crashed

Whole of America was in poverty

 

Issues and events

Great Depression

Rural poverty

Unemployment

Consequences of Depression

Economics and class

 

No subjective nor objective viewpoint is being generated

Historical issue 

Feelings of plight and melancholy is the attitudinal position

 

Artwork - Photographs: Artifacts of life and events

Rule of thirds, shutter speed, aperture

Candid reportage or staged images

Most of Lange’s works are candid, apart from some works where she told them how to pose

Vectors within the image

Journalistic or aesthetic

More journalistic as Lange’s was informing her audience 

How, what, when, who and why?

Studying the Great Depression again

 

Audience - Critical consumer of the photographs

Social background of the audience?

Americans generally 

Further iinto the future would be people from all around the world such as artists who are influenced by her work or for historians who were interested in studying the Great Depression

How are they considered critical consumers to the photographs?

Interest and context to the photo - how is it being developed?

Ideologically sympathetic or challenge the conventions?

Ideologically sympathetic as most of her audience is feeling the hardships as she is as well

- THINK ABOUT THE WHY??