Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1940
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor
Description
A great deal is known about 27-year-old Allie Mae Burroughs, whose portrait is one of the most iconic images of the Depression. Featured in James Agee and Walker Evans’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (on view in this exhibition) under the pseudonym Mrs. Gudger, she was a poor sharecropper’s wife and mother of four. The only thing known about Lange’s subject is the name of her town. These two women in their twenties, faces lined with care, were photographed mug-shot style, head-on against weathered wood walls. Despite facing great adversity, both demonstrate determination and fortitude, and perhaps a hint of defiance at being offered up as specimens of rural and small town suffering during the Depression.
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange American, 1895-1965
Dorothea Lange was a well-known documentary photographer who created memorable images of depression-era America. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange gained her first photographic experience working for Arnold Genthe in New York City. She then studied with Clarence H. White at his School of Photography and in 1919 opened a portrait studio in San Francisco. The following year she married painter Maynard Dixon and continued to work as a studio photographer until the early 1930s, when she began photographing unemployed laborers and labor strikes.
Paul Taylor, a University of California economics professor who later became Lange's second husband, was impressed by her documentary work and in 1934 hired her to photograph migrant agricultural workers for the California State Emergency Relief Administration. Lange's work for Taylor led to a job with Roy Stryker at the U.S. Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration) in 1935, photographing unemployed and homeless migrant workers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. In 1942, the year after she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Lange began photographing Japanese-American internment camps in the United States.
Later Lange worked for the Office of War Information and as a freelance photographer for Life magazine and other publications. She also traveled with Taylor to Asia, Latin America, and the Near East. In 1966, the year after her death, a major retrospective of Lange's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. M.M.