genesis09: 2010

Genesis Salazar

Photojournalism Report

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange a true photographer, her eyes was a camera lens! Dorothea would see beauty in every little corner even in the most old, wrinkled pair of hands. She lived a visual-life as she would call her naturalness for being such a sensational photographer of her time. Lange as a young girl was disillusioned with school; she would cut classes and go walk on the streets of her neighborhood on the lower-east side of New York to explore. Dorothea Lange was born May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. Lange was born two a second generation of German immigrant parents. Dorothea Lange suffered two major life changing event in her life. First, she contracted polio at the age of seven which left her with a limp that kids in school made fun of. Her mother was even ashamed of her cripple daughter. When she was twelve years old he father walked out on the family, they never saw or heard from him again. It is then that Dorothea decided to drop her birth name Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn to Dorothea Lange. Her family went to live with their maternal grandmother and Aunt Caroline. Her mother got a job as a librarian after school, Lange would meet her mother and take walks in Manhattan that is where she discovered her wealth of visual and decided she wanted to be a photographer. Dorothea was a very independent lady and instead of taking a career path her mother would want like becoming a teacher, she decided to go uptown seeking a job as a photographer. She went to the studio of a famous portrait photographer Arnold Genthe. She was hired by Arnold Genthe and there she began her life changing career. Arnold taught her how to set up a camera, how to set up the studio light, he taught her the importance of understating a subject was essential in making a portrait and that was truly the artistic part of photography. Dorothea Lange opened her successful portrait studio around 1919. In 1920 she married noted western painter Maynard Dixon, had two sons one born in 1925 Daniel Rhoades Dixon. The second child, born in 1929, was named John Eaglesfeather Dixon. With The Great Depression Era it wasn’t a surprise for Lange to turn her camera lens from the studio to the streets there Lange studied the homeless, unemployed people capturing the attention of local photographers. By 1935, her photographs captured Roy Stryker attention, then organizing his celebrated photographic section of the Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration in Washington. Lange was employed for federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange also joined such photographers as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston in the f.64 group, the group’s name because members used the smallest possible lens opening to obtain depth and sharpness in their pictures. Photographer and artist Ben Shahn said later that "Dorothea's work was sent in or brought in by somebody and this was a revelation, what this woman was doing." Lange soon joined Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, and others in the organization. Their photographs marked American history by proving that the government used art directly for propaganda purposes. Newspapers along with magazines, exhibition rooms, and movie theaters were encouraged to display these images. Her biographer David Scherman described Lange as "endowed with most of the acceptable stigmata of the certified genius, photography division." She was also, "alternately (but always theatrically) kindhearted and inconsiderate, implacably egotistical, domineering, contentious, apparently humorless, self-analytical ad nauseum," and "hardworking to the point of exhaustion.” In December of 1935 Lange divorced Dixon and married agriculture economist Paul Schuster Taylor. Taylor educated Lange in social and political matters together they documented rural poverty, exploitation of sharecroppers, and migrant laborers for the next five years. This made Dorothea Lange a unique photographer of her day. She took notice for the unknown people, she made others look at them and pay attention to their needs. Dorothea Lange was made it comfortable with everyone that she encountered, but particularly the group she focused on with the silent and invisible population suffering from circumstances beyond their understanding or control. Such people trusted her; Lange viewed and exhibited them with compassion and respect. “Her ease with subjects, dedication to the improvement of their lot, and mastery of her chosen form of communication help place her work among the most enduring of its kind.” (http://www.answers.com/topic/dorothea-lange) For Lange, her mission was,” Among the tools of social science--graphs, statistics, maps, and text--documentation by photograph," she wrote in 1940, "now is assuming place." Documentary photography, she added, "invites and needs participation by amateurs as well as by professionals. Only through the interested work of amateurs who choose themes and follow them can documentation by the camera of our age and our complex society be intimate, pervasive, and adequate.”All this is preserved in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. In 1945 she photographed the United Nations Conference in San Francisco for the State Department. Lange did assignments for LIFE magazine, such as “Three Mormon Towns" (1954) and "The Irish Country People" (1955); and recorded "Death of a Valley" (1960) for Aperture. Even in her last years 1950’ and 1960’s she produced vivid photography of the post-war industrial scene of the Bay Area. Dorothea Lange died of cancer on 11th October, 1965, just before the opening of her major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1965 her unique collection became a major gift to the Oakland Museum of California. The collection was given by her husband, Paul Schuster Taylor. The collection includes Lange's personal negative file of more than 25,000 images, over 6,000 vintage prints, and a selection from Lange's personal papers and library. Lange photographic career ended but her legacy of tying her art to both a cause an activist cause and an academic investigation as for her husband Paul Taylor working with Dorothea Lange “culmination of unorthodox research techniques that placed greater emphasis on photography and interviews than on quantifiable data.”( http://berkeley.edu/lange/history.html)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0013.html

http://www.myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=d_lange

http://museumca.org/global/art/collections_dorothea_lange.html