The Photography of Dorothea Lange

I've been interested in the life, times and work of Dorothea Lange of late. Her photography strikes more than any other photographer's work can (though Henri Cartier-Bresson come to mind). Lange's Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s is what she's most known for. Her ability to humanize the tragedy of the Depression is startling. Sharecroppers, displaced families, migrant workers, she captured them all. Her iconic image, "Migrant Mother," is the image of the Depression.

But what's more powerful to me than the images of that era are the photos she took for the War Relocation Authority. After the attack on Pearl Harbor she captured on film the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans to relocation camps in the West, most notably Manzanar, a camp in Southern California. The Puyallup Fairgrounds, near where I live, was one such internment camp. Her images of the Japanese and the camps were so powerful, in fact, the Army impounded them. Today you can view them in the National Archives and/or the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

The old cliche is that "a picture is worth a thousand words." With Lange's, I always must ask, "Only a thousand?"