Dorothea Lange Biography

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The 1900’s photographer Dorothea Lange humanized the Great Depression and brought to life the faces that she photographed during World War II. She was a natural photographer in a true sense because she lived, in her words, "a visual life." She would look at a pair of calloused hands, lines of people, or a woman with her children and find a story behind it. Her eye was a camera lens and her camera--as she put it--an "appendage of the body." Lange was born on May 25th in 1895 in Hoboken , New Jersey . Sadly, In 1902 at the young age of seven, she developed Polio, which weakened her right leg. She walked with a permanent limp the rest of her life. The neighborhood children made fun of her, and even her mother would act ashamed of her crippled…show more content…
Instead of becoming a teacher as her mother had hoped, she went against her wishes and found herself uptown in the studio of a famous portrait photographer, Arnold Genthe, asking him for a job. She was hired, and the beginning of her career began. She learned the basics of course, how to set up a camera and studio lights. But soon she met many met many established and well-off people, and studied how Genthe portrayed people: he didn't just quickly take their picture; he somehow seemed to make the camera understand the people. Dorothea saw this and realized that an understanding of your subject as a real person was essential in making a portrait. She took that as something that would shape her photography for the rest of her…show more content…
In 1965, the last year of her life, Dorothea Lange was honored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City . Elizabeth Partridge, daughter of photographer Rondal Partridge who worked as Lange's assistant for many years, has written about this remarkable artist in the biography Restless Spirit: the Life and Work of Dorothea Lange. In 1972 the Whitney Museum of Art used twenty-seven of her photographers in an exhibit called “executive Order 9066” It highlighted the Japanese Internment, During World War II. On December 15th 2008, she was inducted into the California hall of fame. Dorothea once said: “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” But little will Dorothea be

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