Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was an American documentary photographer whose images of poverty and displacement shaped public understanding of the Great Depression.

Migrant Mother: A 1936 photograph by Dorothea Lange showing Florence Owens Thompson and her children at a California migrant workers’ camp. This portrait became Lange’s most recognized image of Depression-era poverty.
Documentary photography: Photography that records people, places, or events to communicate information about real conditions. Lange’s government assignments made her a defining practitioner of this broader photographic approach.
Paul Schuster Taylor: An American economist and labor scholar who studied migrant workers and collaborated with Dorothea Lange. Taylor’s research and writing supplied economic context for Lange’s photographs of farm labor.
Photojournalism: Journalism that uses photographs to report and interpret events and social conditions. Lange’s images helped establish photography as a form of public reporting on poverty.
White Angel Breadline: A 1933 photograph by Dorothea Lange depicting men waiting for food at a San Francisco breadline. Its solitary foreground figure captures the urban unemployment Lange photographed early in the Depression.
Farm Security Administration: A United States agency created in 1937 to address rural poverty during the Great Depression. Its photography program employed Lange to document the effects of poverty and displacement.
Roy Stryker: An American economist and government official who directed the Farm Security Administration’s photographic program. Stryker commissioned and organized the documentary work that included Lange’s assignments.
Visual rhetoric: The use of visual forms to shape interpretation, emotion, or argument. Lange’s compositions made hardship legible as a social issue rather than a private misfortune.
Japanese American incarceration: The forced removal and confinement of people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during World War II. Lange’s 1942 photographs documented the removal of Japanese Americans from California.
Field notes: Written observations made during research or fieldwork to record details and context. Lange used captions and notes to preserve information gathered alongside her photographs.

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