Dorothea Lange

Born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895^[1], she contracted polio at age seven, leaving a permanent limp she later described as "the most important thing that happened to me." She changed her surname to her mother's maiden name Lange after her father abandoned the family. Training under photographer Clarence H. White in New York, she opened a portrait studio in San Francisco in 1919^[1] and built a steady trade photographing the city's elite.

The Depression changed everything. Seeing unemployed men queuing outside a soup kitchen from her studio window, Lange took her camera into the street. The resulting photographs caught the attention of Paul Taylor, a Berkeley economist (whom she would later marry), who helped secure her a position with the Federal Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration. Between 1935^[1] and 1942 she produced thousands of images documenting migrant labourers, tenant farmers, and displaced families across the American^[1] West.

When Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps following Pearl Harbor, Lange documented this process for the War Relocation Authority. Her photographs were promptly classified and suppressed by the Army, and most were not seen publicly until decades later. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952^[1] and continued working until cancer curtailed her in 1964. A retrospective at MoMA opened in 1966, the year after her death, cementing her position as one of the twentieth century's defining documentary photographers.