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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