1895-1965
Photographer

Early Years.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, as Dorothea Margeretta Nutzhorn, Lange early took her mother's maiden name. Disabled by the childhood polio that left her with a lifelong limp, Lange discovered her photographic vocation as she was finishing high school. She apprenticed herself to a series of Manhattan portrait photographers before moving to San Francisco in 1918 to embark on a career doing romantic photographic portraits. During the 1920s she made several long trips with her first husband, painter Maynard Dixon, to the Southwest to photograph.

A Change Wrought by Hardship.

Dorothea Lange describes her transformative moment as occurring in 1932 when, from the studio where she sustained her portraiture business, she gazed out into the alley below and witnessed daily scenes of misery and poverty. "The discrepancy between what I was working on in my printing frames and what was going on in the...