Location
Dorothea Lange
Years: 1895–1965 | Role: Photographer | County: Dallam
Topics
Description
Dorothea Lange was a documentary photographer who trained with accomplished 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.
In 1935, Lange was hired (along with other noted artists, such as Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and Gordon Parks) by the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration to document the nation’s diversity and vastness. 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.
Her Texas shots showed 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 pictures 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.
After WWII began, Lange began work for the War Relocation Agency, chronicling the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans. In 1945, she took up teaching photography at the California School of Fine Arts, and in 1952 co-founded the leading photography magazine, Aperture. Lange passed away in San Francisco in 1965.
Location Notes
Some of Lange's iconic Depression-era photos of soil erosion, drought and despair were taken in Coldwater District, in north Dallam County. A potential marker site could be at the intersection of US Highway 385 and FM 296, close to and east of Coldwater, and about 27 miles north of Dalhart.
Files
- Dorothea Lange, Dust Bowl Farm, Coldwater District, near Dalhart, Texas (June 1938) - LC-USF34- 018260-C [P&P] LOT 547
- Dorothea Lange, Dust Bowl Farm, Coldwater District, near Dalhart, Texas (June 1938) - LC-USF34- 018241-C [P&P] LOT 547
- Dorothea Lange, Dust Bowl Farm, Coldwater District, near Dalhart, Texas (June 1938) - LC-USF34- 018178-E [P&P] LOT 547
- Dorothea Lange, Dust Bowl Farm, Coldwater District, near Dalhart, Texas (June 1938) - LC-USF34- 018262-C [P&P] LOT 547
Bibliography
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Timothy Egan. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007.
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Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Thayer. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939.
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Anne Whiston Spirn. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.