Dorthea lang

             "Hands off! I do not molest what I photograph, I do not meddle and I do not arrange." Spoken by the well known Dorothea Lange. This was one of her main principles being a photographer. She showed America the truth about the real Americans of the depression. Her work has provided one of the most committed social documentaries of photography in our century. .
             Dorothea Nutzhorn was born in Hoboken, New Jersey on May 26th 1895. As a child at the age of seven she contracted polio which left her with a permanent limp which she often said she believed that heightened her sensitivity to the sufferings of others. Her father soon after that abandoned the family, she decided to then take her mother's maiden name, Lange. In 1914 She visited the Fifth Avenue portrait stupid of Arnold Genthe, he gave her her first camera and encouraged her with her photographic work through the next year. She began to study photography at Columbia University in the year 1917. There she interned under Clarence White. She then was swept away and employed in San Francisco only for about a year as a freelance photographer. After doing well there she opened her own studio another year later in Berkley California. .
             Lange documented change and it's human cost. She didn't start her truly well known work until 1932 she began to get away from portraits and doing more of people in their social context, the streets San Francisco. With her direct manner she took pictures with she showed the bitter poverty of migrant workers and their families. It showed the hopelessness and despair, but she also showed the American spirit of pride and dignity despite the circumstances. .
             One of her most well known photographs was of the Migrant Mother. It was a portrait of a Californian migrant worker with her three children. Lange captured so much of what the whole depression was about. Wrinkles on the mothers face from worry, the gaze in her eyes full of wonder and worry about what is next.