Dates of Artist Life: Born: May 26, 1895 , Hoboken,NJ
Personal Background: Lange studied photography at Columbia University in New York City under Clarence H. White. She was a member of the Photo-Secession group. In 1918 she decided to travel around the world, earning money as she went by selling her photographs. Her money ran out by the time she got to San Francisco, so she settled there and obtained a job in a photography studio.
Style: Dorothea Lange's images of Depression-era America made her one of the most acclaimed documentary photographers of the 20th century. She is remembered above all for revealing the plight of sharecroppers, displaced farmers and migrant workers in the 1930s, and her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California(1936), has become an icon of the period. Since much of this work was carried out for a government body, the Farm Security Administration, it has been an unusual test case of American art being commissioned explicitly to drive government policy.
Philosophy: Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph Migrant Mother (1936) has long been used to epitomize the Great Depression in the United States. Lange's documentary photographs have shaped the discipline, acting as a vehicle for socio-political commentary whilst preserving moments in contemporary' life.
Influences: Dorothea Lange was a photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly. She influences me because when i look back at what she did and it made me think how much she had to go through.