Dorothea Lange: The Consequences Of The Great Depression

There were very many influential people in the 1930s. One that stuck out the most was Dorothea Lange. She was a professional photographer, a very known professional photographer, during the Great Depression and even after that. She documented the struggle of migrant farm families. Lange photographed the pain and despair of women, men, and children living in dirty, miserable camps. She also photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets of San Francisco (Migrants). Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the FSA or the Farm Security Administration. Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development
Fifteen million people were out of work and she began to visualize using her camera as a tool to record the suffering. In 1933, taking her brother Martin along for support, Lange explored the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District, which were lined with the homeless, hungry, and unemployed. She was concerned that she would anger her subjects by invading their privacy. She was worried that her large camera would frighten them away, that her process would be too slow, and that she would be accused of violating their dignity. But no one seemed aware of her. Not even the man with the tin cup, who faced away from the others on the White Angel Breadline. Hunched over the railing with his hat shielding his haggard face, he seemed lost. Lange was a newcomer to street photography but not to seizing the moment: “… I saw something, and I encompassed it, and I had it.” Whatever Lange “had” was a disturbing but beautiful image that would come to represent the face of the Great Depression: The weariness indicated by the man’s posture, the emptiness of his cup, his individuality obscured by the low brim of his hat, and his isolation from others on the breadline, all adding up to a poignant yet respectful portrait of hopelessness and despair. Jordan’s soup kitchen occupied a junk-filled lot in San Francisco located on the Embarcadero near Filbert Street. This area was known as the White Angel Jungle. The Jungle was not far from Lange’s studio. As she began to change direction from portrait to documentary photography, Lange focused her lens on the poignant scenes just beyond her window. White Angel Breadline is the result of her first day’s work to document Depression-era San Francisco. Decades later, Lange recalled: “[White Angel Breadline] is my most famed photograph. I made that on the first day I ever went out in an area where people said, ‘Oh, don't go there.’ It was