Dorothea Lange: Life Work

© Dorothea Lange/Oakland Museum of California

This exhibit offers a comprehensive career retrospective of original lifetime prints by the legendary documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. Highlights include oversized exhibition prints of her seminal portraits from the Great Depression, such as White Angel Breadline, Migratory Farm Worker and, most famously, Migrant Mother – an emblematic picture that came to personify pride and resilience in the face of abject poverty in 1930s America.

Lange herself knew adversity early in life. At age 7, she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifetime limp. And at age 12, her father disappeared, leaving an impoverished household behind. Every day she would ride the ferry with her mother from Hoboken to Lower Manhattan to a roiling working-class neighborhood teeming with immigrants. During that period, Lange talked her way into photo courses with a range of teachers as diverse as Arnold Genthe and Clarence White. In 1918 she moved to San Francisco, where she befriended the photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and through them, the celebrated Western painter Maynard Dixon, who became her first husband. She soon opened a thriving portrait studio that catered to San Francisco’s professional class and monied elite. But with the crash of 1929, she found her true calling, as a peripatetic chronicler of the many faces of America, old and young, urban and rural, native-born and immigrant, as they dealt with unprecedented hardship, sometimes with resilience, often with despondence. Her immortal portraits seared these faces of the Depression era into America’s consciousness.