Became a photographer at age of 24, opening a studio in 1919 to take portraits for the wealthy.
In 1929 social documentary was used to capture what was going on in America at the time, the dust bowl, the work of the resettlement agency, this images captured were dramatic and historically significant. They showed the world what poor looked like.
There were two periods of Lange's work, the Great Depression, and Japanese Internment, which started out as a photographic project, became a photographic monument of hope.
| Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange |
Possibly Lange's most famous image, Migrant Mother, a posed image where Lange's earlier portrait photography having an influence on the composition, the classical poses of the hand to the chin and the children all looking away. This and Lange's work on the Farm Security Administration capture the human condition, the contrast with the context.
Many of the FSA images tell a complex story in which denotation and connotation play an equally important part. Denotation is the literal meaning of the word or image. Connotation is the association (emotional or otherwise) which the word or image evoked in a particular viewer; this will largely depend on cultural factors like race, education, political stance etc. an example of this is Dorothea Lange's image of a migrant mother. this powerful image denotes despair, hoplessness and suffering; it connotes that society either didn't care or had simply forgotten that such people existed and needed help.
Lange was finishing a month's trip photographing migrant farmlands for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of her experience:
"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I don not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two, She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children had killed. she had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it" (from Popular Photography, Feb 1960, quoted in Wells, p42)
Documentary purports to produce truth and fact for us rather than the connotations required by the photographer, art director of editor. So where does the boundary lie between social documentary and photojournalism or editorial photography? Photographs are subjective in the sense that they represent the creator's interpretation of the scene - the photographer chooses what to take and when, even if they don't have a conscious motivation. Can documentary photography ever be entirely value free? I don't believe it can ever be value free, the individual taking the image is in control and whilst the intention could be truth and fact, there are so many elements that could influence the production of an image especially with the popularity now of effects and the ease of post processing on mobile phones that it would be hard to believe that anything is true and scepticism has become the norm.
P 39-49 of course reader - The cultural impact of Lange's Migrant Mother and the Farm Security Administration (FSA)
pp 69-71: The discussion about documentary photography, photojournalism and the relationship between them.
One of the central principles of the documentary aesthetic was that a photograph should be untouched, so that it's veracity, it's originality, might be maintained. Even minor violations of this principle were frowned upon.
Documentary = untouched
Photojournalism = photographers don't often own the negatives and therefore have no control over the cropping and captions, and are therefore not necessarily true.
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