dorothealange

Dorothea Lange: The Photographer of Depression-Era Rural America

Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer who is best known for Migrant Mother, an iconic photo of the Great Depression. Her work helped Americans see the devastating effects of the depression on rural America, and Lange is now celebrated as a pioneer in the field of documentary photography.

Great Reads in Photography: March 28, 2021

Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy-reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!

One of the World’s Oldest War Photos is Going Up for Auction in 22 Days

Sotheby's has announced the contents of its upcoming Spring photography auction, and it's quite the lineup. The April 3rd auction will include photos by Dorothea Lange, Irving Penn, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and a salt print by Roger Fenton that's thought to be one of the earliest war photographs ever made.

How the Iconic Photo ‘Migrant Mother’ Came to Be

Dorothea Lange's 1936 photo Migrant Mother is an iconic photo of the Great Depression. The Nerdwriter made this fantastic 6-minute video that tells the behind-the-scenes "story of how Dorothea Lange created perhaps the most iconic photograph in American history."

San Francisco in the Great Depression: Photos by Dorothea Lange

In 1918, photographer Dorothea Lange left New York on a trip to travel the world. That ambitious trip was cut short by a robbery, and Lange ended up settling in the San Francisco Bay Area and opening a studio there. During the Great Depression, Langue took her camera out of the studio and onto the streets to document the country for the Farm Security Administration.

Photos of Photographers in the Great Depression

During the Great Depression, the US government launched the largest photography project it ever sponsored by sending photographers across the country to document America. Of the 170,000 photos captured by photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein, some of them showed other photographers at work with their cameras.

We've gathered together a collection of photos showing photographers during the Great Depression (and the few years following it) between 1935 and 1946.

Yale Project Makes 170,000 Depression-Era Photos Searchable with Interactive Database

Dorothea Lange's iconic Migrant Mother, pictured above, is just one of the roughly 170,000 photographs taken between 1935 and 1945 for a project commissioned by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).

All of those photos are currently being stored in the Library of Congress, but a dedicated team from Yale University is looking to revitalize this invaluable collection of photographs by organizing them, pairing them up, and explaining how these images and photographers came together to create the most comprehensive looks at America following the Great Depression and into the early years of WWII.

One Thousand Historic Photos Unveiled by the New York Public Library

It seems like every few weeks another long-lost photo archive is discovered and digitized, and the newest of these archives is a set of one thousand historical images taken as part of a Farm Security Administration project in the early 20th century. The photos -- some of which were taken by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Russell Lee -- were originally put together to combat poverty, but have instead become an important glimpse into what was then simply everyday American life.

Iconic Photo Exposed: Migrant Mother

For every iconic photograph that's out there, there was likely a number of other photographs taken at the same time that many people probably have never seen. One such photo is Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange -- an image that became one of the defining photos of the Great Depression. The woman in the photo, Florence Owens Thompson, had been travelling with her family when their car's timing chain snapped. After setting up a temporary camp to wait while her husband and two sons went to town for repairs, Dorothea Lange drove up and spent 10 minutes capturing 6 photos.