Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange changed the way Americans saw poverty, using her camera to document people living through economic hardship with a level of intimacy and dignity that made their struggles impossible to ignore.
Lange began her career as a portrait photographer, but the Great Depression changed the direction of her work. Instead of photographing people who could afford to come to her studio, she took her camera into the streets and documented unemployed workers and families struggling to survive. Those photographs caught the attention of the federal government, and in 1935 she began working for the Resettlement Administration, creating images that were used to show the human consequences of economic policy.
Her most famous photograph, “Migrant Mother,” was taken in 1936 at a California pea-pickers’ camp. The image, which shows a mother surrounded by her children, became one of the defining photographs of the Depression, turning one family’s hardship into a portrait of a much larger crisis. She continued to photograph people whose lives were often overlooked, including Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.
Lange's work shaped how people understood history—and redefined which stories were worth seeing.
