Hopi Man
1926
Taos, New Mexico
1931
White Angel Bread Line
1932
Street Demonstration, San Francisco
1933
Ditched, Stalled, and Stranded
San Joaquin Valley, California
1935
Unemployed Men
Texas
1935
Hoe Culture,
near Anniston, Alabama
1936
Migrant Mother;
Nipomo, California
1936
Plantation Overseer and His Field Hands,
near Clarksdale. Mississippi
1936
Jobless on Edge of Pea Field
Imperial Valley, California
1937
Woman of the High Plains
“If You Die, You’re Dead–That’s All.”
Texas Panhandle
1938
J.R. Butler, President of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Memphis, Tennessee
1938
J.R. Butler,
President of the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union
Memphis, Tennessee
1938
Farm Workers, South of Tracy, California
1938
Back
1938
Crossroads Store,
Person County, North Carolina
1939
Migratory Cotton Picker
1940
Young migratory mother,
originally from Texas"
Edison, Kern County, California
April 11, 1940.
Riverbank Gas Station
c. 1940
Salute of Innocence
1942
Lovers, Richmond, California
1942
Pledge of Allegiance
1942
Richmond, California / "It Was Never Like This Back Home"
1943
Mexican Labor Off for the Melon Fields in the Imperial Valley
1950
Young Mother and Son, Gunlock, Utah
1953
Country Road,
County Clare, Ireland
1954
Third Born/John Dixon, Daughter Lisa, Sons Gregor and Andrew,
Berkeley, California
1958
Korean Child
1958
Egypt
1962/63
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A obra da fotógrafa americana Dorothea Lange constitui uma das mais importantes contribuições para documentários sociais de fotografia de maior compromisso do século XX. A seguir aos estudos na Columbia University, em Nova Iorque, iniciou-se como fotógrafa independente de retratos em S. Francisco. Chocada com o número de desalojados à procura de emprego durante a Grande Depressão, decidiu tirar fotografias de pessoas na rua para chamar a atenção para a situação. Em 1935, juntou-se à Farm Security Admnistration (FSA) e denunciou as condições de vida nas zonas rurais dos EUA. De uma forma inflexivelmente directa, documentou a pobreza amarga dos trabalhadores migrantes e das suas famílias. Uma das fotografias mais famosas do projecto FSA é Mãe Migrante, o retrato de uma trabalhadora que migrou da Califórnia com os seus três filhos. Esta imagem, extremamente concentrada e rigorosamente composta, fez de Dorothea Lange um ícone da fotografia socialmente comprometida.
Dorothea Lange nasceu em Hoboken, New Jersey, em 1895 e morreu em São Francisco, Califórnia, em 1965.
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“This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?”
Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. She studied photography at Columbia University and worked at a New York portrait studio until 1918 when she began to travel. Stranded in San Francisco, she continued studio work during the 1920’s. With her husband, the painter Maynard Dixon, she traveled the southwest, photographing Native Americans. She believed that the camera could teach people ”how to see without a camera.” The social upheaval brought on by the Great Depression led Lange to take her camera into the streets where she documented the sufferings of the dispossessed, in breadlines and labor strikes, in the wrenching drama of endless waiting. In 1935 with her second husband, Paul Schuster Taylor, a labor economist, Lange was employed by the California and Federal Resettlement Administration (Later the Farm Security Administration) to record the Dust Bowl exodus when drought and hard times forced thousands of farm families to move west in search of work. Her most familiar image, “Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1936,” now in the Library of Congress collection, derives from this assignment. Of her work during this era Lange said: “The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, ’how did you do it, where did you find it, ‘ but they would say that such things could be.” During World War II Dorothea Lange documented the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps and then turned her lens on women and members of minority groups at work side by side in California shipyards. Following the war, she covered the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco. The first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship (which she was unable to complete because of illness), Lange traveled widely during the 1950’s and 1960’s. She visited Vietnam, Ireland, Pakistan and India, doing many photographic essays for Life magazine. Dorothea Lange’s work reflects insight, compassion and profound empathy for her subjects. Her photographs are reproduced in books and housed in museum collections, most numerously in the Oakland Museum of California. Although she did not consider herself to be an artist, she said of her work: “To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable…But I have only touched it, just touched it.”
From "Americans Who Tell the Truth"
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