Tony Pacheco Period 5

Dorothea Lange
Armed with a Camera
Dorothea Lange was one of the few woman photographers who was daring enough to change the art of photography, an activity dominated by men. Also she managed to help a bunch of migrant farmers who desperately needed government aid during the Great Depression. Never before has any form of art had such an impact on so many lives. Lange wasnt always into photojournalism. When she started in photography, she did portraiture for rich families, never leaving the studio. She worked for some of the most famous portrait photographers of the time, such as Clarence White and Arnold Genthe. They taught her how to master the art of photography. She impressed them with her ability to bring out the subjects personality in the composition of the shot. Her pictures were literally worth a more than a million words. Because he was so pleased with her work, Genthe gave her his 4x5 Graflex, a mongo camera made of wood and metal. After a while of being trapped in the dark confines of the portrait studio, Dorothea wanted to get out. She made plans to travel around the world with her friend Fronsie Ahlstrom. They managed to get to California before they went through the hood and got all there money stolen. Dorothea worked for a printing company for a while until she had enough money to open her own studio at 540 Sutter Street in San Francisco in the year of 1918. She continued to do portraiture for years, but it got boring again after a

while. She was sitting on a rock in the middle of a storm for some reason when she had a kind of spiritual awakening. She was sick of the studio. She had to get out for good. There I was, sitting on a big rock- and right in the middle of it, with the thunder bursting and the wind whistling, it came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate upon people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didnt.-Dorothea Lange Lange was somewhat of an odd sight when she was out taking pictures. She dressed like the common man and she had a limp from the polio she developed in her early childhood. For a woman this was absurd looking, but somehow she managed to blend in with her surroundings. People usually didnt notice her, and when they did, they felt comfortable with her. She wasnt some intimidating guy walking around with a camera the size of a Costco lunchbox. Her ability to move without being noticed allowed her to get up-close and personal with her subjects. She also had to develop the skill to spot a shot when it came and capture it quickly. Out in the world, she couldnt tell people what to do for a picture. She became a skilled social observer. She had a great eye for composition in the unpredictable conditions. When the Depression hit, it really kicked the Midwest in the pants. Thousands of farmers were getting kicked off their land and heading west to California to find work. Soon California was overpopulated with oakies. Once all the jobs were taken, the unemployed had to survive on almost nothing. Lange saw the poverty stricken families as an endless supply of photo opportunities. She took pictures of the people and their horrible living conditions. After a while she put together a collection of these photos and showed them to the public in her studio. Her pictures startled almost everyone that laid

their eyes upon them. Her work seemed to bring out and intensify the suffering of the subjects to the viewers. The sharp focus of her pictures seemed to bring out every spec of dirt, every stress wrinkle, and every scar of the subjects. She didnt even have to fit the whole body of the person in the shot to have a big impact. The tight composition and sharp focus of Langes photos caught the eye of Paul Taylor, a university economics professor. He thought her work would go along well with his own writing projects. They decided to team up and travel California to survey the conditions. After a few months of making reports, the government got a hold of some of Langes shots. The conditions shown in the prints slapped them in the face. Almost immediately help was sent out to families throughout California. A new government agency called the Farmer Security Agency (FSA) hired them to continue their work. Some of Langes most famous pieces came from the time she was shooting for the government. Migrant Mother is by far the most well known photograph of the depression. It is of a mother and her children stranded in a Hoover Ville next to a field of frozen peas. Because the crop was destroyed, there was no work and no money. The mother had to sell the tires off of her car just to feed her children. This picture alone made the government send out truck loads upon truck loads of supplies and food, including that good ol govment cheese. Dorothea Lange changed the art of photography into something much more exciting than before. She invented the type of photojournalism that we know today. Her work also rocked the world for so many migrant families on the brink of starvation during the Great Depression of the 1920s. Without her work, hundreds, if not thousands of families in California would go without food and other form of government aid.

Works Cited Partridge, Elizabeth. Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Print. Sills, Leslie. In Real Life: Six Women Photographers. 1st ed. New York: Holiday House, 2000. Print. Turner, Robyn. Portraits of Women Artists for Children: Dorothea Lange. 1st ed. Boston: Little Brown, 1994. Print.