Dorothea Lange

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Dorothea Lange, 1936

Dorothea Lange (born May 26, 1895 as Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken , New Jersey , † October 11, 1965 in San Francisco , California ) was an American documentary photographer . She is considered a co-founder of documentary photography .

Life

Dorothea Lange was born as the first child of a German immigrant family of the second generation. Her parents were Joanna Caroline "Joan" (née Lange) and Heinrich Martin "Henry" Nutzhorn. Her brother Henry Martin Nutzhorn was born in 1901.

Childhood and youth

In 1902, at the age of seven, she contracted poliomyelitis . As a result, her right leg and foot were affected. A lifelong handicap from limping was the result. The neighborhood children scoffed at her, and even her mother was ashamed of her disability.

In 1907 her father, whom she never saw again afterwards, left the family. She pushed him out of her mind and later never spoke about him even to her children. Her mother approached the new challenge very pragmatically: to save costs, they moved in with grandmother Sophie Lange and great-aunt Caroline. Lange's mother found a job as a librarian at the New York Public Library on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to support the family. Dorothea Lange was enrolled in a public school in New York , which was located in a district inhabited almost exclusively by Jewish immigrants. As the only non-Jewish student, Dorothea Lange found herself in an outsider position. Not up to the school requirements, she lost more and more interest in learning. She did not develop any contact with the neighborhood and was therefore never a member of any social group. She later attended Wadleigh High School for Girls in an upscale neighborhood of Uptown New York. But she was no better there either. In her autobiography she later noted that she was "cruelly unhappy" as a teenager. She spent a lot of time observing, absorbing, and processing daily life around her. During this time she developed an inner strength which gave her the strength to follow her own wishes and needs. The combination of these two factors - the visual perception of social conditions and an inner self-image shaped by a strong will - gave her the ability to tackle her goals at the age of 18. Presumably from deep disappointment at the loss of her father, she took her mother's maiden name and dropped her middle name.

After graduating from high school in 1913, when she was 18, she declared, “I want to be a photographer.” But her family was against it. At her mother's request, she attended a teachers' seminar for three years. In addition, she completed a two-year self-imposed apprenticeship, working in her free time in various portrait studios and with photographer friends, including the famous Arnold Genthe and Charles H. Davis . She also takes courses in photography with Clarence H. White at Columbia University . In 1917 she completed her photography studies at the university.

Portrait photographer

She left New York with her only friend Florence Bates to explore the world and earn a living as a budding photographer. After they were robbed en route, the trip ended prematurely in May 1918 in San Francisco due to lack of money . Long stayed there, joining the San Francisco Camera Club where she could use the darkroom . In 1919 she opened her own portrait studio on 540 Sutter Street with borrowed money. She portrayed influential and wealthy people and became financially independent. She was extremely successful with her studio and gained reputation with it. One of the closest friendships in San Francisco was with Roi Partridge and his wife Imogen Cunningham . Through Partridge, she met her husband, the painter Maynard Dixon , who was 20 years her senior , whom she married in 1920. Under Dixon's influence she got to know the living conditions of the Indians in the reservations to the southwest . In 1926 she took her first meaningful documentary photo , that of a Hopi Indian.

On May 15, 1925, their first son, Daniel Rhodes Dixon, was born; on June 12, 1928, her second son, John Eaglefeather Dixon.

Documentary photographer

Harvesters harvesting peas
Dorothea Lange (1939)

October 24, 1929, on which the stock market in the USA collapsed and triggered a global economic crisis and which became known as " Black Thursday ", was to change Dorothea Lange's life considerably again. When unemployed and hungry people gathered in front of her photo studio to feed the poor , she went out to take photos of the depressed people. She began photographing the victims of the Great Depression in San Francisco. She photographed demonstrations and strikes , welfare recipients and migrant workers queuing for food or sleeping in front of the labor exchange.

White Angel Breadline (1933) was created when she was installing a soup kitchen for the needy and hungry on the street , making it one of her first photos of the street to be widely known. On May 1, 1933, she photographed the May demonstration in San Francisco. Her photos of the dockers' strike in 1934 were shown in an exhibition by Willard Van Dyke , co-founder of group f / 64 , in his gallery in Oakland . There was Paul Schuster Taylor , social and economist of the University of Berkeley , noticed her. He arranged for one of her photos to illustrate his article in Survey Graphic about the general strike. He won her over to work at his institute of the State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA).

Lange closed her portrait studio and for the next six months documented the situation and poverty of the tenant farmers and migrant workers in rural areas for SERA. Taylor interviewed and recorded economic data, Lange photographed. The first report they wrote caused a fundamental change in official policy. The government then gave $ 20 million for a migrant home construction project. Taylor and Lange fell in love. In 1935 Dorothea Lange divorced her husband Maynard Dixon, also because of his frequent affairs and derogatory remarks about her work, and shortly afterwards married Taylor.

Florence Owens Thompson , aka "Migrant Mother," in a pea picker warehouse, Nipomo, California

Roy Stryker, head of the information department of the Resettlement Administration (RA, later renamed Farm Security Administration (FSA)), became aware of Dorothea Lange and hired her to travel through the USA for his department and to document rural living conditions with photographs. In March 1936, on the way back from an excursion, after some hesitation, she stopped her vehicle at a pea-picking camp, saw a woman ( Florence Owens Thompson ) who was sitting in a tent with her children, and took a photo of them as a migrant Mother became known. This image became one of the most widely distributed and exhibited photographs in history. On March 10th, some of her photos appeared in the San Francisco News . Then food deliveries were arranged in the region. 9000 kg of food reached the starving people in this way. There are different representations between Dorothea Lange and Florence Owens Thompson about the creation of the photo.

In 1939 Lange published her first book An American Exodus , a collection of photographs of her with texts by Taylor. In 1940 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) showed her photos including the Migrant Mother ; in the same year Lange began to suffer from a number of illnesses , including stomach ulcers . In 1941 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for outstanding achievements in photography. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), however, she returned the award in order to document the forced relocation of Japanese-born Americans to internment camps for the Office of War Information (OWI) . In 1945 she photographed the founding assembly of the United Nations in San Francisco for the United States Department of State and then collapsed due to overwork. Out of consideration for her health, she stopped taking photos for a few years until 1951.

In 1962, after another serious illness, she had a series of operations. In September 1964, she was told that her cancer was no longer curable. Before her death, she put together the material for a retrospective at MoMA New York. Dorothea Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965 in San Francisco . The retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art opened in January 1966.

Long photos "humanized" the social tragedy, the abstract concept of poverty was given a face. Your recordings should have a lasting impact on documentary photography . They shaped the collective memory of the Depression period in the USA and gained great popularity .

plant

overview

  • From 1919 to 1934 she successfully ran her own portrait studio.
  • 1933 White Angel Breadline , one of her first and probably most celebrated photos “from the street”.
  • 1933 Photographs from the May demonstration in San Francisco.
  • 1934 Photographs from the Longshore Strike in San Francisco.
  • She took photographs from 1935 to 1939 and worked for Roy Stryker in the Farm Security Administration (FSA).
  • 1939 Book: An American Exodus , a collection of photographs by Dorothea Lange with texts by Paul Taylor.
  • From 1940 to 1945 she worked for the Office of War Information (OWI).
  • In 1942, she photographed the internment of Japanese-born Americans in assembly camps .
  • 1942 Article: Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus in Survey Graphic magazine , by Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange.
  • In 1945 she photographed the United Nations conference in San Francisco.
  • 1949 Exhibition of Edward Steichen: Sixty Prints by Six Women at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
  • 1951 Exhibition of Edward Steichen: The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
  • 1952 co-founder of Aperture magazine with Ansel Adams, Minor White, Barbara Morgan, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Ernest Louie, Melton Ferris and Dody Warren.
  • 1954 Essay: Three Mormon Towns for Life magazine with Ansel Adams.
  • 1955 Photo essay: Irish Country People for Life magazine .
  • 1957 Photo Essay: The Public Defender .
  • From 1958 to 1963 she and her husband Paul Taylor traveled to Japan , Vietnam , South Korea , Hong Kong , the Philippines , Burma , Thailand , Indonesia , Palestine , Nepal , Pakistan , Europe , South America , Egypt , Iraq & Iran .
  • 1960 Photo essay: Death of a Valley (Berryessa Valley) for Aperture magazine .
  • 1960 to 1964 work on the series American Country Women .
  • 1962 Exhibition of Edward Steichen: The Bitter Years at the Museum of Modern Art , New York City.
  • 1964 Start of work for the retrospective with Director John Szarkowski, Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
  • 1966 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
  • her photographic work has also appeared in numerous publications across the United States .

"Migrant Mother"

Migrant Mother ( Florence Owens Thompson ), Nipomo, California, by Dorothea Lange (1936).
Oakland Museum of California, gift of Paul S. Taylor.

The genesis of what is probably Dorethea Lange's most famous photo, Migrant Mother , is told in different ways.

Dorothea Lange 1960:
“I saw a hungry and hopeless mother and approached her as if attracted by a magnet. I don't remember explaining my presence or my camera to her, but I remember she didn't ask me any questions. I took five exposures, closer and closer from the same direction. I didn't ask her name or her story. She explained to me that her age was 32 years. She said they lived on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and on birds that the children killed. She had just sold her car's tires to buy groceries. She sat there, leaning against the tent, with her children crouching around her, and she seemed to know that my photos could help her, so she helped me. There was a kind of equality in the matter. "

Florence Owens Thomson's grandson Roger Spraque :
“Then a shiny new car (it was only two years old) drove into the entrance, stopped about twenty yards from Florence, and a well-dressed woman came out with a big camera. She started photographing Florence. With each picture the woman came closer. Florence thought, "Don't pay her any attention. The woman thinks I'm original and wants to take a picture of myself." The woman took the last picture less than four feet away and then said to Florence: "Hello, I'm Dorothea Lange, I work for the Farm Security Administration and document the plight of the migrant workers. The photos will never be published, I promise." Florence said, "Okay if you think it will help". The woman turned around, went away, got into her car and was gone. "

The next day the photo was featured on the front page of the San Francisco News. A few days later, groceries reached the warehouse. In order to help those affected, Dorothea Lange thought it justified to break a promise.

Florence Thompson later complained that Dorothea Lange had become wealthy and famous with her photo, while her situation had not changed.

Two years after the picture was taken, Dorothea Lange retouched her thumb in the lower right corner of the negative . Lange's superiors were extremely upset because it damaged the documentary nature of the photo. Even if the change was only marginal, Lange violated her credo quoted below and crossed the line from documentary to art photography.

In 1998 the auction of a contemporary print by Migrant Mother raised nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Today the 35 by 27 centimeter print hangs in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu .

Publications in book form

(mostly posthumously)

  • with Paul Schuster Taylor: An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Reynal and Hitchcock, New York 1939; Revised edition, Yale University Press, New Haven 1969; Reprint: Arno Press, New York 1975, ISBN 2-85893-513-0 .
  • Dorothea Lange looks at the American Country Woman. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth 1973, ISBN 0-378-08012-1 .
  • with Margaretta K. Mitchell: To a Cabin. Grossman, New York 1973, ISBN 0-670-71627-8 .
  • Dorothea Lange: Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935–1939. The Text-Fiche Press, Glencoe, IL 1980, ISBN 0-89969-001-7 .
  • Dorothea Lange. In: The Aperture history of photography series. Aperture, Millerton, New York 1981, ISBN 0-89381-078-9 .
  • Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime. Aperture, New York 1982, ISBN 0-89381-835-6 .
  • Dorothea Lange, text by Jan Arrow. Macdonald, London 1985, ISBN 0-356-10853-8 .
  • Dorothea Lange (Masters of Photography Series). Aperture, New York 1987, ISBN 0-89381-282-X .
  • The Photographs of Dorothea Lange. Hallmark Cards in association with HN Abrams, Kansas City, MO 1995, ISBN 0-8109-6315-9 .
  • Dorothea Lange's Ireland, text by Gerry Mullins, essay by Daniel Dixon. Elliot & Clark, Washington, DC 1996, ISBN 1-880216-35-3
  • The human face. NBC Editions, Paris 1998, ISBN 88-7032-584-9 .
  • Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 2001, ISBN 0-14-230024-1 .
  • Impounded: Dorothea Lange And the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment. WW Norton & Company, 2006, ISBN 0-393-06073-X .

Quotes

  • "It is no more a coincidence that the photographer becomes a photographer than it is a coincidence that a lion tamer becomes a lion tamer."
  • "The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera." In: Los Angeles Times August 13, 1978.
  • "The subject is not the good photography, the effect of the photography is the subject."
  • "You must not take anything away from anyone, neither the personality nor the dignity nor the integrity."
  • “For me, documentary photography is less a matter of the subject than of the approach.
    What matters is not what is photographed, but how.
    My own approach is based on three considerations.
    First : hands off! I do not change or arrange anything that I photograph in any way.
    Second : a feeling for the place. I try to depict everything that I photograph as part of its environment, where it is rooted.
    Third , a sense of time. I try to show everything I photograph in such a way that its position in the past or present becomes visible.
    But beyond these things, I have only one thing on my mind - a quote pinned on the door of my darkroom: To see things as they are, with no substitute or fraud, without error or ambiguity, is a nobler thing than one Abundance of inventions. "

Literature and Documentary

German

English

  • Pierre Borhan, AD Coleman, Ralph Gibson, Sam Stourdzé: Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer . Bulfinch, Boston 2002, ISBN 978-0-8212-2791-6 (English).
  • Milton Meltzer: Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life . Syracuse University Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0-8156-0622-2 (English).
  • Elizabeth Partridge: Introduction in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life . Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC 1994, ISBN 1-56098-350-7 (English).
  • Karin Becker Ohrn: Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1980, ISBN 0-8071-0551-1 (English).
  • Therese Thau Heyman: Celebrating a Collection: The Work of Dorothea Lange . Ed .: Oakland Museum. Oakland 1976 (English).
  • Suzanne Riess: The Making of a Documentary Photographer . University of California, Berkeley 1968 (English, interview).

Movie

  • Meg Partridge: Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life. Biography, 1994, 47 minutes, (English).

Web links

Commons : Dorothea Lange  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Bingham: Maynard Dixon (1875-1946). In: maynarddixon.com. The Thunderbird Foundation For The Arts, 2001, archived from the original on July 3, 2007 ; accessed on April 5, 2015 .
  2. ^ Dorothy Lange: White angel breadline, San Francisco. 1932, Retrieved April 7, 2019 (English, reproduced on Art Gallery New South Wales website, 2007).
  3. ^ Inventory of the State Relief Administration Records. In: Online Archive of California. Retrieved April 5, 2015 .
  4. ↑ see article on Florence Owens Thompson
  5. ↑ An American Exodus - Displacement in the 1930's. In: American Studies. University of Virginia , archived from the original January 16, 2000 ; accessed on April 5, 2015 .
  6. ^ Aperture Foundation. In: aperture.org. 2008, archived from the original on January 13, 2008 ; accessed on April 5, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Lange, Dorothea
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American documentary photographer
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Hoboken, New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 1965
Place of death San Francisco