Semester Project: Dorothea Lange

Angel Ayala
04/24/2017

I decided to focus on Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) for my semester project given how she was born in New Jersey. The reason she was chosen was because of the work she produced during one of the United States’ darkest time, the Great Depression. During that time, unemployment rates were as high was 25%, which is almost unimaginable. Citizens lost all their life savings because of the banks failing. With no job or money, people had to move around from city to city trying to take any job available, as it ultimately led to dead ends. As a result, many of them committed suicide to escape the misery they were enduring, and others lost their children due to not being able to feed them. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, he enacted the Resettlement Administration, later renamed to the Farm Security Administration to combat poverty. Because of her amazing photography skills, Lange embarked on a four-year cross-country journey by the Resettlement Act to capture the “poor” and “forgotten” people such as sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers.

With this in mind, I created an Instagram page to show the photographs that Lange took between 1935-1939. These photographs exposed the harsh reality of the Great Depression. One is able to see the horrible conditions that the poor had to live in when no money was available for better living conditions. Other photographs display the normalcy that these people tried to get back too. Moreover, one can see the look of despair and misery in the eyes of the people, especially the photographs of the children. Although all of the photographs were from Google Images, several websites were used to caption them, which are listed at the bottom of the blog. I also used the United States History website for information regarding the Great Depression.

Link to instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/angel_anw/

Username: angel_anw

Bibliography 

https://fineartamerica.com/shop/prints/dorothea+lange

http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/lange/dor12-138.htm

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/related/?va=exact&sp=1&q=Migrants--California&fi=subject&sg=true&op=EQUAL

http://photogrammar.yale.edu/search/results.php?start=0&lot=356&year_start=1935&month_start=0&year_stop=1945&month_stop=12

https://selvedgeyard.com/2009/12/06/photography-of-dorothea-lange-an-american-archive-hard-times/

"The Great Depression." United States History. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2017.