Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange made Migrant Mother, which is probably the most reproduced photograph of the twentieth century, and spent her later life uneasy about what such pictures do to the people in them. She had polio at seven, which left her with a limp she said taught her how to approach people, trained under Clarence White, and ran a successful portrait studio in San Francisco until the Depression sent her into the street to photograph breadlines. From 1935 she worked for the Resettlement Administration and then the FSA under Roy Stryker, driving California and the South with her economist husband Paul Taylor, whose field reports gave the pictures their evidentiary weight. Migrant Mother was made in March 1936 at a pea-pickers' camp at Nipomo in about ten minutes; the woman, Florence Owens Thompson, was not asked her name, and said decades later that she had never seen a cent from it and resented the picture. Lange also photographed the Japanese American internment in 1942 for the government, and the results were so plainly critical that the army impounded them; they were not widely seen for fifty years. She had ulcers and other illness for decades and worked around it. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art opened months after she died. She co-founded the magazine Aperture with Ansel Adams and others in 1952. Her internment photographs were released to the National Archives and published in full only in 2006. Thompson s family identified her publicly in 1978 and the story ran nationally. Lange was working on the retrospective while dying of oesophageal cancer.

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