Dorothea Lange (Hoboken, May 26, 1895 –San Francisco, October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer. Her birth name was Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn, but she decided to be called Dorothea Lange, taking the mother’s surname.
In 1902, at the age of 7, she was affected by polio, which caused her to have a permanent deficit in her right leg. Dorothea Lange, however, reacted to her handicap with extreme determination, studying photography in New York with Clarence White and collaborating with several studios, such as Arnold Genthe’s famous one.
In 1918 she left for a photographic expedition across the world. When the money ran out she stopped in San Francisco, opening his own studio and becoming an integral part of city life, until her death. Right where Genthe had built her success, before moving to New York, Dorothea Lange married the painter Maynard Dixon and had two children, Daniel (1925) and John (1928).
His careful reconnaissance work between the unemployed and the homeless of California attracted the immediate attention of the Rural Resettlement Administration, a federal crisis monitoring body destined later to become the FSA (Farm Security Administration). She photographed peasants who had left the countryside because of the Dust Bowl, the sandstorms that had desertified 400,000 km2 of U.S. farmland. Her photos attracted the attention of Paul Schuster Taylor, an economist from the University of California, who commissioned her an extensive photographic documentation.
Between 1935 and 1939, she made a large number of reports, always on the condition of immigrants, laborers and workers. 1935 was also the year in which Dorothea divorced Dixon, marrying Paul Taylor who became the key man in her professional activity: Taylor contributed with interviews, data collections and statistical analysis to his wife’s photographic reports.
In 1947 she collaborated in the creation of the Magnum agency and in 1952 she was one of the founders of Aperture magazine.
Due to the poor health conditions in which she endured in the last years of her life, her activity suffered a sharp standstill. She died aged 70 from esophageal cancer.