Hoboken, New Jersey. Photography

Dorothea Margarette Nutzhorn was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA, on May 26, 1895. She removed her middle name (Margarette) and adopted her mother's maiden name, Lange. She studied photography in New York as a student of Clarence H. White and informally participated as an apprentice in numerous photographic studios such as the famous Arnold Genthe. Although it began with a marked picto-realistic cut, later, her going out to the street as a reporter would definitely mark what she used as the hallmarks of her work. In fact, the crash of 29 led her to leave her studio to portray the suffering of the working classes. This work gave her international recognition and marked the trend of her work, dedicating herself from that moment to humanist photojournalism.

In 1918 she moved to San Francisco, where she opened a successful studio. She lived in Berkeley Bay for the rest of her life. In 1920 she married the notable painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons: Daniel, born in 1925, and John, born in 1928.

With the beginning of the Great Depression, she also began to photograph the street, to frequent the f / 64 group. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people soon attracted the attention of local photographers and led her to be hired by the administration federal, later called "Administration for Agrarian Security".

Her best known work takes place in the 30s, the depression years, working from 1935 to 1940 for the FSA. In December 1935, she divorced Dixon and married the agrarian economist Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor of economics at the University of California. Taylor trains Lange in social and economic affairs, and together they make a documentary about rural poverty and the exploitation of migrant farmers and workers for the next six years. Taylor did the interviews and collected the financial information, and Lange took the photos. In 1938, she and her husband began to prepare "A American Exodus, A Record of Human Erosion", a book that collects texts and photographs on migration motivated by depression.

Between 1935 and 1939 Lange worked for official departments, always portraying in her photos the poor and marginalized, especially peasants, displaced families and immigrants. Distributed free of charge to national newspapers, her photos became icons of the time.

In 1941, Lange received the Guggenheim Fellowship award for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she used her prestige to record the forcible evacuation of Japanese Americans (Nisei) from concentration camps in the west of the country. It covered all the acts of relocation of the Japanese, their temporary evacuation in assembly centers and the first permanent camps. For many observers, her photographs of Japanese American girls presenting honor to the flag before being sent to concentration camps is a reminder of the policies of detaining people without a criminal charge and without the right to defend themselves.

Her images were so obviously critical that the Army seized them. The photographs are currently available at the University of California Bancroft Library and Photography Division.