The Blog of Awesome Women/ Dorothea Lange: Activist Photographer
February 19

The Blog of Awesome Women/ Dorothea Lange: Activist Photographer

“The discrepancy between what I was working on in the
printing frames and what was going on in the street was
more than I could assimilate,” wrote Dorothea Lange of
the reason she quit her job as a society photographer to
record the misery of the Depression of the 1930s. Lange’s
sympathy for human suffering shines through in her
luminous photographs, including her famous “Migrant
Mother” and “White Angel Breadline.” Her compassion
came under attack later, however, when she was viewed
as being overly empathetic with the Japanese Americans’
internment during World War II. Though she was hired
to record this event for posterity, the photographs were
impounded and not shown until 1972, seven years after
her death. Nonetheless, Lange was not deterred from her
personal mission to capture the essential and universal
humanness shared around the world. Her genius was in
documenting that which might be ignored if not for her
artistic eye compelling us to look.

 

Full blog post here

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