A black and white photo of a woman combing a child's hair, Negro women near Earle, Arkansas

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Dorothea Lange contracted polio as a young girl. She learned professional photography skills while working in New York in her early 20s, and then landed in San Francisco where she ran a portrait business catering to the city's wealthy elite. Her second husband, Paul Taylor, helped her to get out into the fields with the destitute pickers, who she'd treat like portrait subjects with empathy and identification with her subjects. When the Depression hit, she captured crowded breadlines. In the late 1930s Dorothea Lange had been hired by the photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration - to photograph Dust Bowl refugees escaped into California from the Midwest and her images went far beyond bureaucratic reportage. A skilled portraitist, Lange might not have been able to change government policies, but her images for the FSA were picked up by newspapers across the country. John Steinbeck used them for inspiration in his 1939 Dust Bowl tale "The Grapes of Wrath."

Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist. She is best known for her work during the Great Depression when she captured powerful images of the hardships faced by many Americans. Lange studied photography at Columbia University in New York City under Clarence H. White, a member of the Photo-Secession group. In 1918 she decided to travel around the world, earning money as she went by selling her photographs. Lange's photographs helped to raise awareness of the difficulties faced by many people during this time, and they remain an important record of American history. She was a member of the Photo League, a group of photographers who sought to use their work to expose social and political issues. Lange died in 1965. Her portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography.

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