Happy Birthday Dorothea Lange!

Born May 26, 1895. in Hoboken, N.J., Dorothea Lange was an important documentary photographer during the Great Depression. Lange studied photography at Columbia University but is best known for her portrait work of migrant workers in southern California. Hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program, Lange documented the desperate conditions of those suffering from the tragedies of the Great Depression. Her iconic images brought the misfortunes of the rural poor to the public’s attention.

Her work is considered both portraiture and documentary due to its emotion-invoking nature. Her best-known image, “Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1936,” is a perfect example of this combination. Lange was able to bring out emotion in her images, in a way that did not always exist in photography. Sadly, Lange passed away in 1965, but her work will forever be remembered for its impact on society as well as the visual arts.

A New Deal

PBS’ Art Beat section, a segment on its Web site devoted to reporting the goings-on in the art world, recently featured a piece (“A New Deal for Artists”) about governmental aids instituted to preserve and encourage art during the Great Depression. Lately, there has been an inundation of articles drawing parallels between the Great Depression and our current economic situation and, thankfully, “A New Deal for Artists” does not exude a tone quite as disastrous; instead, the article celebrates the various governmental programs that encourage art. Because of various governmental programs, like the National Endowment for the Arts, contemporary artists have a better chance at perpetuating their art than did their counterparts before Roosevelt’s New Deal. Despite the briefness of the program, the Works Progress Administration helped set in motion the idea that the government could and should help artists. Fifty-six of the 15,000 commissioned works are now on display at the Smithsonian Institution. The Georgia Museum of Art has a number of paintings (and some prints) by artists who benefited from similar revitalizing efforts set in motion by the government during the Great Depression, like James E. Routh Jr., Andrée Ruellan, Ben Shahn and Stuart Davis.