Trailblazers

Sanctuary celebrates Dorothea Lange, a documentary photographer who greatly influenced others in her field and was the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography.

Dorothea Lange ​(1895-1965)
Photo: Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. She is an American documentary photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography.
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Dorothea studied photography at Columbia University in New York City. In 1918 she decided to travel around the world, earning money as she went by selling her photographs. Her money ran out by the time she got to San Francisco, California, so she settled there and opened a portrait studio which she operated from 1919 to 1940.

During the Great Depression, Dorothea began to photograph the unemployed men who wandered the streets of San Francisco. The photograph titled White Angel Breadline (1933), showing the desperate condition of these men, was publicly exhibited and received immediate recognition both from the public and from other photographers. These photographs of migrant workers, with whom she lived for some time, were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves.

Her photographs caught the attention of Paul Taylor, an economist at Berkeley. They married in 1935 and collaborated on the book An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in 1939. From 1942 to 1945, she worked for the U.S. government photographing the Japanese American internment camps after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco.

Her most famous portrait, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), which is frequently referred to as the “Mona Lisa of the Great Depression,” now hangs in the Library of Congress and is an enduring image of that era. It shows Florence Thompson embracing her children as she looks off into the distance. While Thompson was only in her 30s when the picture was taken, she appears haggard. Her expression is both haunting and determined.

This famous portrait and others like it depicts her empathy for people and her keen ability to communicate the essential elements of the situations she photographed, making her work unforgettable.
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Diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1965, she devoted herself to preparing for a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, held posthumously in 1966. 

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, by Dorothea Lange (1936)
Photo: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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Some interesting facts...

• At age seven, Dorothea contracted polio, which left her with a withered lower right leg and a twisted, crabbed foot. She could not put her heel down as she walked.
• She was training as a teacher when she decided to become a professional photographer in 1913.
• She worked at the studio of pictorialist photographer Arnold Genthe in 1914 and studied at the Clarence H. White School in 1917.
• Between 1935 and 1939, she traveled extensively for the Farm Security Administration. At this time, she created many of her best-known photographs.
• In 1941 she received the first Guggenheim Fellowship in photography awarded to a woman.
• In 1954 she joined the staff of LIFE magazine, and from 1958 to 1965, traveled to Asia, South America, and the Middle East as a freelance photographer.
• In 2006 Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment was published. This collection was edited by historians Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro.
• After World War II, she created a number of photo-essays, including Mormon Villages and The Irish Countryman, for LIFE magazine.

Digital Archive

Video: NBC News YouTube Channel

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