SEVENTY THREE YEARS AGO TODAY

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August 17, 1936. Blythe, California. "Drought refugees from Oklahoma camping by the roadside. They hope to work in the cotton fields. There are seven in family. The official at the border inspection service said that on this day, 23 carloads and truckloads of migrant families out of the drought counties of Oklahoma and Arkansas had passed through from Arizona entering California." Medium-format negative by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration.

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965)

Born In Hoboken, NJ.Dorthea announced her

Intention to become a photographer at age 18. After

apprenticing in New York City she moved to San

Francisco and in 1919 established her own studio.

During the 1920s and early 1930s Lange worked aa a

portrait photographer, usually the the wealthy. But by

1932 she began shooting San Francisco's urban un-

employed and labor unrest.In 1933 she took the most

famous of these images at the White Angel Jungle, a

soup kitchen for the jobless.

The photographs she took there and and elsewhere over the next few months changed the direction of Lange's photography. In 1935 she accepted a position as a staff photographer with the Federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Her work for the RA/FSA took Lange to the South, where she documented small towns, the lives of tenant farmers, and experimental agricultural communities. Returning to the West, she focused on the lives of migrant workers. In 1940 she was hired by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics to produce photographs for a series of community studies in California and Arizona. During World War II, Lange photographed the internment of Japanese Americans for the War Relocation Authority and the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California, for the Office of War Information. After the war, despite ill health, she photographed the founding of the United Nations for the State Department and completed several assignments for Life magazine in the United States and around the world.