This is not some ordinary lady, sitting on a truck. The year is 1936, and on the main picture is posing one of the most famous American female photographers, Dorothea Lange, with her Graflex 5x7 Series D camera sitting on the roof of a 1933 Ford Model C, 4 door Wagon.
In the 1930s, the US Farm Security Administration (FSA) employed several photographers to document the effects of the Great Depression on the population of America. Many of the photographs can also be seen as propaganda images to support the U.S. government's policy distributing support to the worst affected, poorer areas of the country. Dorothea Lange was one of these photographers. Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. She became well known by her picture "Migrant Mother" of a supposed migrant pea picker, Florence Owens Thompson and her two kids in California in 1936. Lange captured the mother and her children's feeling of lost hope for the future.
Lange was educated in photography at Columbia University in New York City. In 1918, she left New York with a female friend to travel the world, but was forced to end the trip in San Francisco due to a robbery and settled there, working as a photo finisher. By the following year she had opened a successful portrait studio.
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 led to her employment with the FSA.
In December 1935, she divorced her first husband Dixon and married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years – Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos.
Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941 for her photography work. During the 2nd World War she covered the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded most of them, and they were not seen publicly for more than 50 years.
Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco, California, at age 70.
The pictures show Dorothea Lange herself, her most famous picture "Migrant Mother", and because we are a website about cars, some pictures she made that are showing us some cars.
Text: Marius Hille Ris Lambers, Onestop Photo
Photographs by Dorothea Lange on assignment for the Farm Security Administration.
Source: Wikipedia
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This is not some ordinary lady, sitting on a truck
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