15 Pioneering Female Journalists
12. Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was one of the most important forces humanizing the effects of the Great Depression. The economic disaster became a series of numbers and charts, a distant, unfortunate thing to numerous Americans. Yet, facing some of the now-iconic photographs made by Lange, it was impossible to deny the human victims of the Depression.
Lange attended Columbia University in the early 20th century, where she first encountered photography in a class taught by Clarence H. White, a prominent American photographer. After graduation, she intended to travel the world with a friend. However, she was robbed while in San Francisco and was forced to end the trip. Rather than return to New York, Lange decided to stay in California.
Her photographs of people affected by the Great Depression, beginning in 1933, brought her great attention. Lange eventually scored a job with the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA). It was during this time that she took one of her most iconic photographs, Migrant Mother, in California in 1936. Lange won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941.
While many remember Lange for her important work throughout the Great Depression, she did not stop there. She gave up her Guggenheim Fellowship in order to record the evacuation and forced internment of Japanese-American citizens for the War Relocation Authority.
Lange’s often haunting work captures the displacement, uncertainty, and fear that wracked many of these Americans. The Army, fearing the critical nature of Lange’s work, refused to release many of her internment photographs for more than fifty years.