Unshuttered lens: Dorothea Lange, documentary photography, and government work, 1935-1945

Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, Spring, 2008 by Carol B. Conrad

In November 1940, on Arizona State Highway 87, south of Chandler, in Maricopa County, Dorothea Lange took a photograph of a mother and four small children. Caught in the powerful forces of the Great Depression, this migrant family's plight was used to drive government relief policy. Twenty months later, at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California, Lange photographed another family: a Japanese American family whose migration was intentional, forced by government order.

Understanding that government reports from the New Deal's "alphabet agencies" alone did not always grab the attention of Congress or the public, the Roosevelt administration hired photographers, including Dorothea Lange, to get its message across. Lange was initially employed by the Resettlement Administration (RA), which later became the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), and later was employed by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) and the Office of War Information (OWI). In these positions, her photography did more than satisfy the government's primary purpose of creating an informational record. Her work focused on the government's policies and their impact on people.

More than 1,300 of her government photographs, including the migrant family and Japanese American family, are digitized and readily available online through the National Archives' Archival Research Catalogue (ARC) at http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/. The collection provides students with the means to explore the intersection between photography and public policy that occurred as images became a more powerful medium in the twentieth century. Was Dorothea Lange a cultural interpreter? Former Lange assistant, noted photographer, and protege Rondal Partridge, said, "You ask questions of great photographs, and great photographs ask questions of you." (1) Lange's photographic work "begs the question."

Dorothea Lange was an unlikely candidate for success in the male-dominated field of photography. Born into a middle-class family in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, she was expected to pursue a traditionally female profession, such as teaching. Unwilling to be limited by such gender expectations, she announced upon graduation from high school that she was going to be a photographer, and, without having picked up a camera, set out in pursuit of that goal.

The equipment in those days was very cumbersome, a possible difficulty for Lange who limped after contacting polio at age seven. Teaching herself the rudiments of photography, she began her career by convincing the owner of a highly successful Fifth Avenue portrait studio to take her on as an apprentice. There she developed an eye for crafting evocative images through staged portraits. She learned darkroom techniques by allowing an itinerant photographer to use her basement for his work. She took one course at Columbia with a respected photography professor, but did little of the assigned work.

Her independent spirit was evident in 1918 when she and her only close friend pooled their resources ($140) and set off to "see the world." In San Francisco, when their money was stolen by a pickpocket, Dorothea took a job at a photography developing lab, joined a camera club, and developed a group of Bohemian, artistic friends. Set up in her own studio by a benefactor, Dorothea launched a successful portrait studio catering to San Francisco's upper class. She married an artist 21 years her senior, Maynard Dixon, entered what developed into a rocky marriage, and had two sons. Working hard at balancing family, artistic trips with her husband, and her portrait studio, her life suddenly shifted with the onset of the Great Depression. National events stirred her to focus her lens in a different direction.

Wanting to document the effects of turmoil outside caused by the crisis gripping the nation, Dorothea abandoned her indoor studio. She took her camera to the streets and focused on social crises in the city such as Depression breadlines. Her street images from 1932 to 1935, such as the unemployed worker seen in ARC# 195825, were exhibited in the Bay Area titled as "Documentary" and caught the attention of Paul Taylor, an economics professor and social activist at the University of California, Berkeley. Concerned about the changing rural economy, Taylor was working on a report for a state relief agency on farming communities hit hard by the Depression. He hired Lange to take photographs to illustrate this report. While preparing the report, Taylor and Lange were struck by the numbers of families who had been "blowed out" by the Dust Bowl storms and had flooded into California seeking employment in agribusiness.

Lange's work as a portrait photographer enhanced her ability to see striking images in the field and endowed her photographs with a special personal and emotional quality. Even her method of using large, fixed-tripod cameras, instead of the smaller, lighter 35mm cameras favored by other field photographers, distinguished her field work. These cameras, which were more stationary and personal than 35mm, created a polite space between Lange and her subjects, and allowed her to establish direct contact until the last moment when she bowed her head over the viewfinder and snapped the photo. The cameras allowed shots to be composed in a careful, unrushed manner. The three-image series of a migrant family found in ARC (#s 522506, 522527, 522529) demonstrated her technique. She only used natural lighting, again less intrusive, more nuanced, and more authentic in documenting the scene. Some critics have attributed her method as critical to the effectiveness of her work.