Rondal Partridge - Dorothea Lange photographed by her...

Dorothea Lange photographed by her assistant Rondal Partridge, California, 1936 Exhibition print from Dorothea Lange - Photographs, Galerie Bilderwelt, Berlin 1998 Dorothea was born in 1895 in New Jersey to second generation German immigrants. Her name actually was Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn. But after her father left the family without any explanations, Dorothea’s mother changed the family name back to her maiden name of Lange. As a child, she suffered polio, which left her with a partially paralyzed leg. She later admitted it affected her in everything she did. “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.” After a painful and lonely childhood marked by polio, Dorothea Lange took her first snapshots without a camera during her solitary walks in New York’s Lower East Side. She learned her trade as a portrait studio apprentice and took classes at the Clarence H. White School of Photography. When she met her first husband, painter Maynard Dixon, she was primarily inspired by western landscapes. In 1929, at the onset of the Great Depression, she had an epiphany: she had to focus on people. At the age of 40, she was hired by the history department of the Resettlement Administration, an organization that provided emergency relief to ruined rural families, and which in 1937 became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Until 1942, this government agency implemented a massive project, halfway between documentation and propaganda, with the purpose of “introducing America to Americans” through photography. While her often reproduced images were becoming icons of the crisis (including the famous Migrant Mother from 1936—in reality a woman who had moved to California ten years earlier), the artist began taking her mission far more seriously.

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