bling conditions of the dispossessed. One of Lange’s
first images of this unrest is a photograph of a
breadline near her studio, which became one of her
most famous images,White Angel Breadline, 1933.
The unshaven man with his hands clenched in front
of him, leaning against a wooden railing, his back to
the crowd waiting for his ration of food, creates an
overwhelming sense of isolation, a feeling that will
be omnipresent in Lange’s images to come. Lange’s
images begin to shift from her portraiture techni-
que, in which the individual is taken out of their
context, to a style that focuses on the relationship
between the subject and their environment such as
Dust Bowl Refugees Arrive in California, 1936.
Lange continued to photograph the social tur-
moil of the Great Depression in the streets near
her portrait studio while she received her first exhi-
bition in 1934 at Willard Van Dyke’s Brockhurst
Gallery in Oakland, California. Lange had made
portraits of Van Dyke and his colleagues Ansel
Adams and Edward Weston all of whom were asso-
ciated with the Group f/64, a group of West Coast
photographers. Although Lange did not join the
group, she was in contact with several members.
At this first showing of her work, Lange’s pho-
tographs were noticed by Paul Schuster Taylor, an
economics professor at Berkeley. He asked her to
take photographs for his articles dealing with social
research and reform. Lange and Taylor collaborated
and together began their mission to publicize the
plight of thousands of Americans for the California
EmergencyReliefAdministration.Their initial work
resulted in field reports made up of Taylor’s inter-
views with workers, Lange’s photo essays and Tay-
lor’s analysis depicting the frightening reality of the
migrant agricultural workers in California. Taylor’s
sociological approach to their subjects would have
an important influence on Lange’s developing style
of photography as well as the thinking of Roy Stry-
ker at the FSA.
After photographing the conditions of migrant
workers in the Imperial Valley, Lange wrote to Stryker,
...what goes on in the Imperial is beyond belief. The
Imperial Valley has a social structure all its own and
partly because of its isolation in the state those in control
get away with it. But this year’s freeze practically wiped
out the crop and what it didn’t kill is delayed—in the
meanwhile, because of the warm, no rain climate and
possibilities for work the region is swamped with home-
less moving families.
Taylor and Lange were married in 1935 and con-
tinued their professional partnership until Lange’s
death in 1965.
In 1935, Lange was hired by Roy Stryker of the
Resettlement Administration’s Photographic Divi-
sion, which would become the Farm Securities
Administration (FSA) in 1937. Part of Roosevelt’s
New Deal, this governmental operation developed
programs intended to help impoverished farmers.
The FSA hired photographers to document rural
America and Lange, along with Walker Evans, Ben
Shahn, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, and others, be-
came part of this project to show America at work
and document the deteriorating social situation.
Today, these photographs hold an important place
in the history of documentary photography repre-
senting a pervasive public state of misery. The FSA
images carry on a documentary tradition begun by
Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine around the turn of the
twentieth century, but add a new dimension to doc-
umentary photography in the intimacy of the por-
traits, which is most notable in the work of Lange.
Lange threw herself into her work with the FSA,
as she did with all her endeavors, and began travel-
ing and surveying the countryside to document
rural poverty. Lange also became a social observer
of the migrating farmer population. She inter-
viewed her subjects and took extensive notes, as
Taylor had done on their projects together, creat-
ing a context for her images. Lange continued to
work for the FSA on and off until 1940, despite her
sometimes difficult relationship with Stryker and
the budgetary problems within the administration.
Conflict with Stryker was frequently linked to the
fact that she did not have any control over her
images once the negatives were sent to Washington.
Many of the images from Lange’s FSA period
have become icons of the Great Depression and the
state of despair of the American people at the time.
Her compassionate portraits of poverty stricken peo-
ple such asMigrant Worker in San Joaquin Valley,
California, 1936, Migrant Workers in Rural Califor-
nia, 1938,andMigrant Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona
1940 convey the desolation of rural America. Her
intimate and powerful portraits of women alone or
with children have become symbols in American
pictorial history:Mother and Child, Yakima Valley,
Washington, 1939, Woman in High Plains, Texas
Panhandle, 1938, Mother and Children on the Road,
Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California, 1939and of
course, the most famousMigrant Mother, 1936.
Lange’s great skill was her ability to engage her sub-
jects; this engagement along with her frequent use of
close ups evoke compassion from the viewer.
In her photograph,Hoe Culture, Alabama, 1936,
Lange focuses on the hands and torso of her subject,LANGE, DOROTHEA