Like me you might find it hard to name many pictures by Dorothea Lange. Of course there is ‘Migrant Mother’ and ‘White Angel Bread Line’, but what surprised me when looking through the images at the excellent on-line exhibition of her work from the Oakland Museum of California, the Dorothea Lange Digital Archive, was how many of the pictures were familiar, and how intrinsic they were to my impression of US history, not just of the depression but also through into the 40s and 50s.
The archive also told me much more about Lange’s personal history, perhaps at times a little more than I felt I needed to know – all those pictures of her deformed foot. Of course I already knew the broad outlines of her growing up, her marriages to painter Maynard Dixon and later the love affair, second marriage and long creative partnership with sociologist Paul Taylor, all of which are illuminated in text and photographs.
Of course her limp, the result of childhood polio was important to her, a part of the childhood experiences which, in as it says, instilled ‘in her empathy for “the walking wounded”—her words for people in distress.’ I imagine that it also helped to create a reciprocal empathy towards her from those she photographed.