Dorothea Lange

She was seven when polio took the strength out of her right leg and left her walking crooked for good. It formed her, guided her, instructed her, helped her and humiliated her, she said later, and she never got over it. Five years after that her father walked out, the family moved from suburban New Jersey to the Lower East Side, and she dropped his name, Nutzhorn, for her mother's. She was close to the only gentile at PS 62 on Hester Street, turned loose in the afternoons while her mother worked, learning to watch strangers without being noticed. She had decided to become a photographer before she had ever handled a camera.

She studied under Clarence H. White at Columbia, reached San Francisco in 1918, and found an investor to set her up in portraiture. By 1933 she was making pictures like White Angel Breadline, a man turned away from the crowd outside a soup kitchen. In 1939 she and Paul Taylor put photographs and field notes together in An American Exodus. In 1941 she became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, and gave it up for a government assignment. BriefHistory has the Depression pictures and the wartime one. What is left is the woman who made them.

For 15 years the studio paid the family's bills, and then she walked out of it. She divorced the painter Maynard Dixon on October 28, 1935, and married the economist Paul Schuster Taylor five weeks later. The leg never improved and eventually got worse: what doctors would later call post-polio syndrome took her strength through the last decade of her life, and she worked anyway. In the mid-1950s Life sent her and Pirkle Jones to photograph Monticello, California, a town about to be drowned to make Lake Berryessa, and then declined to run it. Lange gave the whole sequence an entire issue of Aperture, the magazine she had helped found in 1952, and published it herself.

She died of esophageal cancer in San Francisco on October 11, 1965, at 70. Three months later the Museum of Modern Art opened a retrospective she had helped curate, its first for a woman photographer. The reputation has since had to be pried loose from the schoolbooks: when MoMA showed her again in 2020, a critic wrote that the exhibition's first job was freeing her from the history textbooks where she had long been jailed. Hoboken put her on a mural in 2018. In 2023 an oversized 1940s print of her most famous picture sold at Sotheby's for 609,000 dollars, double the estimate.

Dorothea Lange's life against the full span of the corpus.

• White Angel Breadline artwork
  Made outside a San Francisco soup kitchen run by a widow known as the White Angel 1933
• An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion book
  With Paul Schuster Taylor, photographs and field notes set against each other 1939
• Aperture company
  The photography magazine she helped found 1952
• Death of a Valley article
  With Pirkle Jones, on the drowning of Monticello, California. Life passed, so Aperture gave it a whole issue 1960

• 1902 aged ~7 Contracts polio at seven and is left with a permanent limp
• 1907 aged ~12 Her father leaves and she takes her mother's name The family moved from suburban New Jersey to Manhattan's Lower East Side.
• 1918 aged ~23 Reaches San Francisco and opens a portrait studio It supported the family for the next 15 years.
• 1920 aged ~25 Marries the western painter Maynard Dixon Two sons followed, Daniel in 1925 and John in 1930.
• 1933 aged ~38 Makes White Angel Breadline and leaves portraiture behind
• December 6, 1935 aged 40 Marries Paul Schuster Taylor, five weeks after her divorce
• 1941 aged ~46 First woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography She surrendered it within months to take a government assignment.
• 1945 aged ~50 Ansel Adams brings her in to teach at the first fine-art photography department in the country
• October 11, 1965 aged 70 Dies of esophageal cancer in San Francisco A retrospective she had helped assemble opened at MoMA three months later.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. photographed the relief programs of
• Earl Warren 1891–1974
  Chief justice whose Court transformed civil rights, voting, representation, and criminal procedure. documented the removal he urged
• Jacob Riis 1849–1914
  Photographer and reporter whose documentation of New York tenements drove housing reform campaigns. predecessor
• Alfred Stieglitz 1864–1946
  Photographer and gallerist who established photography as fine art and promoted American modernists. shaped the field she entered
• Annie Leibovitz b. 1949
  Portrait photographer whose Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair work defined American celebrity imagery. influenced