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Dorothea Lange

In copyright1895-1965·American·photography·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, and died in San Francisco. Polio at seven left her with a lifelong limp. She had a portrait studio in San Francisco; in 1933 she took her camera out to photograph a breadline near it, and that work led to a job with the federal Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Why they matter

Lange made the pictures by which Americans still remember the Depression, above all Migrant Mother. She wrote as well as photographed, and with the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, her husband from 1935, made the book An American Exodus. When Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from the West Coast she gave up a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph it, and the authorities impounded most of those pictures, which were not seen publicly during the war. Three months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art gave her its first solo retrospective of a woman photographer.

What to buy

Originals are not realistic: her own prints are museum and auction-house objects. Prints: the pictures she made for the government are a special case. The Library of Congress holds the FSA negatives and says there are no known restrictions on the use of the Migrant Mother images, so a reproduction of them is legitimate from anyone, and many later silver prints exist; the Art Institute of Chicago owns prints of Migrant Mother made in 1964, 1971 and 1979, and one from a 1975 portfolio of ten FSA photographs. Those later prints are not by Lange, and a dealer should say who printed them and when. Her work outside the government projects, like White Angel Breadline, made on her own before the FSA, is a different matter: buy only reproductions that name a rights holder. Books: Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, edited by Sarah Hermanson Meister for MoMA's 2020 exhibition, puts the famous pictures beside lesser-known ones, from early street photographs to her work on the criminal justice system.

Notes

Her archive is at the Oakland Museum of California. The FSA negatives, including every frame of the Migrant Mother series, are at the Library of Congress. MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty and the Smithsonian American Art Museum hold prints. Museum labels give two dates, when she took the picture and when the print was made, and the gap can be decades. In copyright under the life-plus-seventy rule this site uses; her government work is the exception.

Story

Migrant Mother was almost never taken. In March 1936 Lange was driving in California when, as she later recalled, she "barely saw a crude sign with pointing arrow which flashed by me at the side of the road saying Pea-Pickers Camp." She drove on for twenty miles before she turned the car around. At the camp in Nipomo she "saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet," and, writing in Popular Photography in 1960, said she made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. She spent about ten minutes there.

The picture that became famous is not quite what she photographed. In the frame as exposed, a thumb holding a tent pole intrudes at the lower right. Lange considered it a glaring defect, and the negative was retouched to erase it; the Library of Congress still keeps an unretouched print that shows it.

The government caption did not name her: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two." She stayed anonymous for more than forty years, until in 1978 a reporter from The Modesto Bee identified her as Florence Owens Thompson. Because Lange had made the picture as a federal employee, it was in the public domain from the start, free for anyone to print, and it still is.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

MoMA ↗The Met ↗Art Institute of Chicago ↗Smithsonian American Art Museum: White Angel Breadline ↗Tate ↗

Prints

eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

MoMA Design Store: Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures ↗Bookshop.org ↗AbeBooks ↗Amazon ↗

See also

Diego Rivera 1886-1957Joaquín Sorolla 1863-1923Gordon Parks 1912-2006Walker Evans 1903-1975Alice Neel 1900-1984Ben Shahn 1898-1969Jacob Lawrence 1917-2000Rata de dos patas 1905-1981

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