Dorothea Lange Research Paper

Words: 1228
Pages: 5

Migrant Mother
Dorothea Lange, best known for her photographs of migrant people during times of great despair, is a remarkable artist. Most of her pictures were taken during the Great Depression, a time when people felt as if all hope was lost, these pictures set the stepping stone and highly influenced photography used in documentaries for the years to come. Dorothea Lange was born on May 26, 1895, in the town of Hoboken, New Jersey, to Heinrich and Johanna Nutzhorn. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother chose to stay at home to watch her and her brother, Martin. Growing up Dorothea faced many hardships, one of the most important being battling with polio, which significantly affected her for the rest of her life, leaving one of her legs and feet, the left, quite noticeably weaker than the other ("Dorothea Lange Biography"). Though this disease changed her life forever, forcing upon her more hardship than children should have to bear, she learn to appreciate it, looking at it with a thankful eye, for without it she would never have been the women she was in her later years in life. Though the hardship and despair did not stop with the polio. Right before Dorothea became a teenager her parents
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Through her entire educational career Lange showed little to no interest in school, and eventually gave up on the idea of college. Instead, she decided to go into the field of photography, studying at Colombia University, and then becoming an apprentice for several different photographers. Soon after that, she was running her own portrait studio in San Francisco. Eventually, she got married to muralist, Maynard Dixon, and had two sons, living a moderately happy middle-class life, or so it seemed ("Dorothea Lange