Dorothea Lange: Powerful Photography

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Dorothea Lange: Powerful Photography December 7 1941, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; February 19, 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066 allowing the military to designate military areas "from which any or all persons may be excluded." Even though it did not mention a race it resulted in 110,000 Japanese- Americans being sent to internment camps (Gordon). The U.S. government paid many photographers to photograph the Japanese neighborhoods as people were preparing to leave, the processing centers and the camps themselves (Gordon). Dorothea Lange was one of these photographers. Lange faced the hard choice of either photographing what the government would have had her photograph, or photograph the truth of the horror she saw. Dorothea Lange was one of the most influential women photographers of her time, 1895- 1965. As a child Lange dealt with polio; which gave her a limp for the rest of her life and possibly fed into her desire to photograph some of the darker sides of what was going on in Japanese internment camps. Lange attended Columbia University studying photography. Lange did many collections; her first big one being the Native Americans in the southwest. Then she went about photographing people in the horrible circumstances during the Depression, next she…show more content…
The Japanese American Internment Camp is no exception to her amazingly powerful works. While the pictures mentioned in this essay focused on statements and innocence, Lange also had many of her photos in this collection focusing on other aspects; such as courage, honor and photos of forlorn looks, sad eyes and faces of people that have been humiliated. In other works Lange has made leaps and bounds in the art of photography. Even though other works of hers such as “Migrant Mother” are very famous, the collection discussed in this paper has been just as
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