dijous, 24 de juliol del 2014

Dorothea Lange and The Great Depression - Dorothea Lange i la Gran Depressió



Dorothea Lange, fotoperiodista (25 de maig de 1895, Hoboken (Nova Jersey), Estats Units - 11 d'octubre de 1965, San Francisco, Califòrnia). 

La Gran Depressió per la qual passava Estats Units va portar a molta gent a viure als carrers i a abandonar les seves cases per buscar feina allà on n'hi hagués. Dorothea Lange estava molt sensibilitzada amb aquesta problemàtica i va fer servir les seves fotografies com un mètode de denúncia. Va començar a retratar captaires als carrers, aturats, etc.

Aviat va ser contractada per l'Estat i va començar a treballar per a l'Administració per a la Seguretat Agrària. La seva tasca consistia a documentar la pobresa regnant a les zones rurals del país.

En aquesta època també va col · laborar amb el seu marit en l'enregistrament d'un documental sobre les conseqüències de la crisi del moment.
Dorothea Lange es va fer mundialment coneguda amb la seva sèrie de fotografies titulada "Mare Migrant". Aquestes imatges van ser preses a Califòrnia el 1936 i s'hi veu a Florència Owens Thompson i als seus tres fills.

Aquest conjunt de retrats defineixen clarament la personalitat del treball de Lange. Pren les seves fotografies de manera propera, clara, concisa i d'una forma molt tendra. En elles reflecteix la situació per la qual estan passant les persones que retrata, però sense fer-los perdre gens de dignitat.

Dorothea va patir durant tota la seva vida d'una feble salut i va morir de càncer als 70 anys.

**

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist

With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

In December 1935, she married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers.

From 1935 to 1939, Dorothea Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten — particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers — to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.

Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson. In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:


I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.



















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