Dorothea Lange – Texas Markers

Topics

Description

Dorothea Lange was a documentary photographer who trained with noted New York commercial portraitists, including Arnold Genthe, Charles Davis, and Mabel Spencer-Beaty, and who studied under the Columbia University photography teacher, Clarence White. She was also active in the Group f/64 circle of photographers, including Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dyke.

Lange brought her photographic skills to the Panhandle of Texas where she captured images of the Dust Bowl during visits in 1935, 1937 and 1938 in work for the Farm Security Administration. Her images documented drought, eroded fields, dust storms, displaced farming families and economic collapse. In this way, she helped the public, and the government, understand the big scale and severe family impacts of debt, soil exhaustion, climate limits, and poor land use. Many of her images found their way into advocacy for federal agricultural and relief policy, including support for passage and funding of the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act and the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.

Location Notes

Some of Lange's iconic Depression-era photos of soil erosion, drought and despair were taked in Coldwater District, Northeast of Dalhart. Coldwater is remote though, so perhaps it is better to site a marker in a more-traveled spot, like the Dallam county seat.

Files

Bibliography

Timothy Egan. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007.
Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Thayer. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939.
Anne Whiston Spirn. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.