by Christopher Conway and Barbara S. Moore

Dorothea Lange was arguably one of the greatest American documentary photographers of the twentieth century. Fronteras is pleased to present this note about her life and a sampling of her photographs about rural life in 1930s Texas.

One of the most famous American photographs of the twentieth century is Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” which was taken in 1936 in Nipomo, California. The photograph captures the determined, chiseled features of a thirty-two-year-old mother named Florence Owens Thompson with her children. Lange later wrote that the family was in a truly desperate situation, struggling to survive on frozen vegetables and dead birds. The photograph became an iconic symbol of the plight of America’s rural poor during the Great Depression.

“Migrant Mother” belongs to an important series of documentary photographs commissioned by the Farm Securities Administration (FSA) to “bring home the unthinkable pain of rural poverty to urban Americans. ”[1] Great photographers like Russell Lee, Arnold Rothstein, and Dorothea Lange, among others, embarked on this mission and produced a dramatic record of rural life in the 1930s. Lange’s photographs are particularly powerful. They pulse with character and memorable composition. Christine M. Kreiser writes that Lange’s “photographs demand our attention and command our respect,” pushing us to “look beyond the obvious and see the forces that brought them into being.” [2]

Lange was born in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey and faced daunting hardships. She came from a broken family and contracted polio as a child. After college, the adventurous young Lange worked in different photography studios in New York before moving to San Francisco, where she eventually opened her own portrait studio. In 1935, she worked with her second husband, a UC Berkeley economist named Paul Taylor, for the California State Relief Administration, to document the conditions and plight of migrant farm workers in Central and Southern California. The photographs she took impressed Roy Stryker, the director of the information division of the FSA and resulted in her recruitment to department’s corp of photographers.

Lange and Taylor sometimes worked together in the field and his reports included content from interviews with her subjects. A current online exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York reflects her humanistic approach to engaging her subjects directly. One of the photographs captures six tenant farmers in Hardeman County Texas, who are displaced by power farming (tractors). The caption states that Lange “gained the trust of her subjects by letting them get to know her a little bit before she produced the camera… And I think they all felt less threatened.” [3] Many of her photographs catch her subjects unguarded, and open to her lens.

Biographer Linda Gordon describes the power of Lange’s photography in this way: “Most of Lange’s photography was optimistic, even utopian, not despite but precisely through its frequent depictions of sadness and deprivation. By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of American democracy. And by showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she simultaneously asserted that greater democracy was possible.”[4]

After her work for the FSA, Lange continued to make great photography. During World War II, she documented the internment of Japanese Americans, and later joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts and San Francisco Art Institute. Her documentary photography was featured in Life magazine, as well as the photography magazine Aperture, which she co-founded. To the very end, Lange remained focused on using photography to tell the stories of the dispossessed in a way that preserved their dignity and humanity.

Fronteras is glad to share a selection of Lange’s photographs of Depression era Texas in the gallery below.

[1] Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, 1st edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).
[2] Christine M. Kreiser, “‘Grab a Hunk of LIGHTNING,’” American History 49, no. 2 (June 2014): 52–59.
[3] “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures,” accessed June 1, 2020, https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/304#stops.
[4] Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, 1st Edition edition (London ; New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).

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