Through Her Lens: Dorothea Lange and the Faces of the Forgotten

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) worked as a portrait photographer before shifting to documentary photography. Through her lens, we saw the faces of the forgotten. Her photos visually narrated the struggles of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, highlighting widespread poverty, migration, and displacement. The eye-opening photograph “Migrant Mother” became a symbol of the suffering of Dust Bowl refugees in 1936. Lange’s published images made the daily struggles of rural Americans visible and helped justify federal aid and reforms. The New Deal was partially because of her work.

Lange’s empathy for her subjects made her photos impactful. She insisted on telling their stories by including detailed captions and notes. She preserved their dignity and gave context to the images. Statistics became real people with complex lives. They were victims of problems beyond their control through no fault of their own.

During World War II, the government commissioned Dorothea Lange to photograph the Japanese American internment. However, the government did not allow the public to see her critical photos. Later, the government released them, and they became influential in debates about civil rights and government overreach.

Lange’s photos told me a story that I only partially knew. My mother was a rural victim of the Depression. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father ran away, I believe out of despair. My grandparents adopted her, and she spent the rest of her life wondering about her family. For years, she waited for them to come for her. 

When I was a child, we often went to Colorado to shop. We passed the Granada internment camp. By then, the buildings were falling apart, but people had riddled them with gunshots. Even as a small child, I knew the overt racism expressed by my family and the government bothered me. The government interned about 11,000 German Americans and 3,000 Italian Americans, compared to over 120,000 Japanese.