Dorothea Lange
Ink and watercolor on 9″ x 12″ watercolor paper
The latest addition to the She Changed the World collection!
Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) used her camera to put eyes on those that society tends to look away from. Growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey, her parents instilled an appreciation and passion for education and the arts. At first going to school to be a teacher, she quickly discovered a passion for photography and changed her focus to that art form. By 1918 she was running her own successful portrait photography studio in San Francisco, but her focus changed in 1920 when she toured the Southwest and she got her first taste of documentary photography during the trip.
In the 1930’s she met her second husband, Paul Taylor, a professor and labor economist and the duo traveled the country to study and document the Great Depression. During this time Lange took her most famous, and one of the most famous photographs of all time, ‘Migrant Mother’. The picture shows a mother flanked by her children, all of them holding tightly to her, a thousand-yard stare on her eyes. It equally speaks to desperation and hope, to the burdens of today and the hopes of tomorrow. It’s a remarkable photograph that became the face of the Depression and solidified Dorothea as one of the first and still one of the preeminent documentary photographers in history. ‘Migrant Mother’ now hangs in the Library of Congress.