Photography Presentation on Dorothea Lange by Rebecca Schloemann

1. by Becky Schloemann Dorothea Lange

3. By 1919, Lange was running a successful portrait studio in San Francisco, California. Clayburgh Children, 1924

4. Dissatisfied with studio portraiture, in the late 1920’s Dorothea Lange began to photograph landscapes and plants. With the 1929 Stock Market Crash, she turned her attention to documentary photography. This move would eventually lead to her employment as a government photographer in 1935. The Road West , 1938

6. Pea Contractor, 1935 “ You can’t do people in trouble without photographing people who are not it trouble, too. Because you have to have those contrasts.” – Dorothea Lange

8. Hoe culture , 1936 Lange’s work is characterized by its detached, documentary style.

9. Plantation Owner and his Field Hands , 1936

10. Mexican Migrant Fieldworker, 1937 Lange’s photographs of migrant workers inspired John Steinbeck as he wrote The Grapes of Wrath , and in the author’s non-fictional booklet on migratory workers, Their Blood Is Strong , he used some of her photos.

11. On the Road Toward Los Angeles, 1937 Lange’s early photographs forced people to acknowledge extreme poverty and brought national attention to the large gaps in America’s class structure. She made quite a few photographs that contrasted billboards with reality.

12. Ex-Slave with Long Memory , 1938 “ Lange’s… lone figures were bereft of any heroicizing vision – lost, trapped, enslaved by poverty.” – Mark Durden

13. Migratory Cotton Picker, 1940

14. I Am An American, March 13, 1942 In 1941, Dorothea Lange became the first woman to receive a photography grant when she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1942 she began working for the War Relocation Authority.

15. From 1943 to 1945 she worked for the Office of War Information in San Francisco. Argument in Trailer Court, 1944

16. From 1958 to 1959 she worked with Paul Schuster Taylor in East Asia. Lange’s photographs often exclude or limit the face of the subject, emphasizing the details, body language, and gestures. Indonesia, 1958

17. From 1962 to 1963 she worked in Egypt and the Middle East. Procession Bearing Food to the Dead, 1963