BEST KNOWN FOR HER ICONIC documentary photographs of Depression America, Dorothea Lange is being celebrated in a new exhibition this Fall at the National Gallery of Art. DOROTHEA LANGE: SEEING PEOPLE is focused on her photographs as portraiture, with the intention of conveying “the critical role she played in the development of documentary photography, and her advocacy of photography as a vehicle for social change.”(Lange Press Release, and catalogue, p. 13.)

NGA Consulting Curator Philip Brookman has organized the exhibition of 101 photographs chronologically, ranging from her early career to her final decades, when she did such important work as helping Edward Steichen select 500 photographs from 68 countries for the MoMA exhibition and book THE FAMILY OF MAN. The NGA’s exhibition is organized into six categories: Early Portraits; Poverty & Activism; The Great Depression; World War II; Postwar America; and World View (1950s-1965). Brookman’s theme is to explore how she used portraiture to reveal the character and resilience of Americans during difficult times. As he writes in the exhibition catalogue, Lange used “an intensely humanitarian body of work” to portray injustice and “transform how we see and understand people” who live in marginalized communities beyond America’s mainstream.

Above right: Dorothea Lange in San Francisco, circa 1920

Lange (1895-1965) was born to German immigrant parents in Hoboken, N.J.. When she was seven, she contracted polio, leaving her with a limp in her right leg that she said “formed me, guided me, instructed me”–and fueled the empathy she would always feel for life’s unfortunates. Instead of going to college as her mother wished, the strong-willed Dorothea –who had never owned a camera– decided that she wanted to be a photographer. In 1913 she managed to cadge a job as a general assistant with New York celebrity portrait photographer Arnold Genthe. Here, she learned what “portraiture” meant and gleaned how a portrait photographer navigated intentions to create insightful portraits that documented personality. She learned about lighting portraits, printing proofs, and manually retouching photographs.

In 1918, Lange moved to San Francisco where she took a job at a photo shop and befriended established photographer Imogene Cunningham. Soon, having found a financial backer, she opened her own portrait studio in San Francisco. According to the NGA exhibition catalogue, Lange’s studio “thrived from the moment she opened her doors and became a gathering place for the city’s eclectic social, artistic, and cultural communities.” (catalogue, 15) Her studio attracted the bourgeois elite of the Bay area, and Lange said, “I had the cream of the trade. I was the person to whom you went if you could afford it.” Although the exhibition doesn’t delve into Lange’s personality, it’s clear that the young woman was not only talented, but possessed a vibrant magnetism that helped fuel her success.

Below left: Dorothea Lange, White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California, 1933 gelatin silver print (13 3/8 x 10 7/16 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser © The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor. Object ID: 5558-002

In 1920 Lange married painter Maynard Dixon, who encouraged her to take her camera outside of her studio. She accompanied Dixon on trips through the Southwest and photographed rural landscapes and Indigenous communities that he was painting. She began making photographs of the streets of San Francisco in 1933, intent on documenting the impact the Great Depression was having on the city’s dispossessed men and women. The image that transformed her from a studio portraitist to a documentary photographer was taken when she photographed a San Francisco bread line: amidst a crowd of jobless men seen from the back, one single figure was turned toward the camera–a desperate old man leaning forward and holding his tin cup. This photograph, titled “White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco” (1933), became one of Lange’s most enduring Depression images.

Two years later, she was the first woman hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the plight of agricultural workers, including Dust Bowl migrants, drought refugees, Mexican cauliflower pickers, and southern sharecroppers. For the next eight years, Lange would work for various New Deal agencies, using the techniques of photojournalism to document what she recognized as the resilience of Depression-era families, farmworkers, migrant camps, and incarcerated Japanese Americans in the early years of World War II. Lange believed in the role of documentary photography wholeheartedly, describing its purpose was to “mirror the present and make documents for the future.”

The FSA’s belief in documenting the Depression was also evident in its Director of Films, Pare Lorenz. His landmark 1936 film documentary, THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAIN, portrayed how misuse of the Great Plains caused the Dust Bowl that wreaked havoc with American agriculture. Of his colleague Lange’s photographs, Lorenz said in 1941, “her still pictures that have been reproduced in thousands of newspapers…have done more for these tragic nomads than all of the politicians of the country.”

Right: Dorothea Lange Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother), March 1936
gelatin silver print, (13 7/16 x 10 9/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 98.XM.162 Object ID: 5558-0

Her relentless humanity shines through all of these photographs, including her most famous image, the timeless “Migrant Mother.” In March 1936 Lange was returning from one FSA assignment when she saw a roadside sign for a migrant worker camp near Nipomo, California. She initially drove past, but then turned around and stopped to photograph the camp. The migrant workers had intended to pick peas, but the crop froze and the workers were destitute. One witness described how “In the cold rain, Lange spotted a mother with a haggard expression and hungry children.” She took seven exposures with her Graflex camera, capturing the 32-year-old woman and her children as they huddled in a tent. The image of the mother–who had trekked from Oklahoma with her 10 children–shows her staring into an empty future, but also portrays her beauty, strength, and fear. Lange sent the photographs to an editor at the San Francisco News, and the final frame became known as “Migrant Mother.” This photograph created an instant outcry and sparked help for the migrant camp, but it took another nearly 40 years before it earned lasting fame. In 1978, a reporter for The Modesto Bee tracked down the migrant woman, a retiree then in her 70s whose name was Florence Owens Thompson. She was living in a mobile home park and wasn’t thrilled to be tagged as the impoverished “Migrant Mother.” Nevertheless, Migrant Mother’s fame became an enduring image of Depression America, even appearing on a U.S postage stamp in the 1998-2000 series “Celebrating the Century.”

“[The 1966 MOMA Lange] exhibition failed to crystallize lasting interest—in fact, the next year, [Curator] Szarkowski himself celebrated a new generation of photographers ‘who were rejecting Dorothea’s attitude that documentary photography was supposed to do some good.'”

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lange went on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to document the forced relocation of Japanese Americans. Between March and July 1942, she photographed this community as over 120,000 Japanese Americans were evacuated to relocation camps in pursuant of FDR’s Executive Order 9066. One of her photographs, “I AM AN AMERICAN,” depicted a sign that a Japanese American store owner had posted above his grocery store in Oakland, California, the day after Pearl Harbor. Ultimately, her photograph made no difference– the store owner and his family were sent to the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona. Because of US military censors and WRA staff decisions, Lange’s photographs for the WRA were suppressed and none published until the war was over. In June 1946, they were placed in the National Archives. Lange said “They (WRA) wanted a record, but not a public record.”

Below left: Dorothea Lange, Japanese American-Owned Grocery Store, Oakland, California, March 1942, gelatin silver print,
(7 1/2 x 9 5/8 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. Object ID: 5558-105

In 1966, Dorothea Lange’s photography was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The Curator of Photography, John Szarkowski, selected 200 Lange photographs taken between 1920 and 1965. He worked with Lange before her death in 1965, describing her as “one of the seminal influences in modern documentary photography.” Szarkowski emphasized “her belief in people, in the significance of the ordinary…and her willingness to by-pass the exceptional to discover the typical.” (MoMA Press Release, 1/25/66) But this exhibition failed to crystallize lasting interest—in fact, the next year, Szarkowski himself celebrated a new generation of photographers “who were rejecting Dorothea’s attitude that documentary photography was supposed to do some good.” Instead, young photographers like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand were using the camera to document their own life experiences. (See Arthur Lubow, “Empathy & Artistry: Rediscovering Dorothea Lange,” NYT, 2/13/2020.)

But times have changed and unlike that earlier effort, several important recent exhibitions have solidified Lange’s significance in American photographic history. In 2017, the Oakland Museum organized an exhibition that celebrated the 50th anniversary of Lange’s gift of her personal archive. The following year, London’s Barbicon Museum presented a highly-successful major retrospective her work– “Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing.” And now, the National Gallery of Art’s new exhibition is giving its signature imprimateur to her lasting contribution.

Why this new-found commitment to Lange’s work? Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator and Head, Dept. of Photography at the National Gallery, suggested at the NGA press preview for DOROTHEA LANGE: SEEING PEOPLE that Lange’s documentary photography is particularly “timely” today. She focused on themes that 21st century audiences find socially relevant, including the treatment of environmental issues, immigrant populations, the erosion of rural communities, racial discriminaton, and women’s rights. But Lange is also relevant because she is an important revelation for younger generations. Their “fresh eyes” will add fascinating contemporary insights about her place in the history of photography and the role art can play in social activism.

I was interested to know more about what cameras Lange used over the decades, from her portrait studio beginnings, through the Depression, to the later photographs she did about people and communities for LIFE Magazine, when she began to use smaller cameras than the large format cameras she had used earlier. National Gallery curatorial assistant Elizabeth Fortune told me that when Lange began working, she used large format cameras that produced 4×5 inch black-and-white negatives. When she began taking street photographs in San Francisco, she used a 3 1/3 x 4 1/4 Graflex camera as well as a 2 1/4 inch square Rolleiflex, which was smaller and easier to carry. Along with the Rollei, she used the Speed Graphic and View Graphic cameras–standard press equipment during the 1930s and 40s–when she worked for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration. In the 1950s she began using a Hasselblad 6×6, and by the late fifties acquired a 35mm Nikon to use while traveling.

Whatever camera she used, Lange’s photographs conveyed compassion for society’s displaced populations. As the National Gallery of Art exhibition demonstrates, her “humane portraits of often-marginalized people galvanized public understanding” and sparked social change–an endorsement that deserves cheers in today’s ranting, polarized times.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor

DOROTHEA LANGE: SEEING PEOPLE will be at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC through March 31, 2024. A catalogue of the same title is available at nga.gov.