Dorothea Lange

The Photographer Who Found the Faces of the Depression

Albert Whitman & Company

(pub. 2.28.2017)
32 pages

A True Tale with
A Cherry On Top  

A uthor: Carole Boston Weatherford
      and illustrator: Sarah Green

C haracter: Dorothea Lange

O verview from the jacket flap: 

     "Dorothea Lange always wanted to be a photographer.

      She knew she could see what others missed. She understood being overlooked after polio left her with a limp and her classmates avoided her. But polio also gave Dorothea a sense of empathy, which she would never lose. 

      When the Great Depression struck, that empathy led Dorothea to take her camera to the streets. She took photos of men waiting in breadlines and sleeping on sidewalks...

      But Dorothea didn't stop there. People began to notice her photographs and soon she was working for the government. Into the dust bowl, into migrant camps, she went looking for the poor, the hungry, those who had been forgotten. She was in search of faces to depict the Great Depression. 

      In lyrical prose, Dorothea Lange tells the story of how the photographer found what she was looking for and got America to take note."

T antalizing taste: 
      

"Now the family was stranded and starving.

Dorothea shot a half-dozen or so pictures

of the mother and her children -

the last a close-up of the woman's deeply lined face.

She looks much older than her thirty-two years.

After two of the photos ran in the newspaper,

the government rushed ten tons of food to the camp.

Because Dorothea turned her lens on hunger and poverty,

Florence Owens Thompson, a full-blooded Cherokee,

became the face of the Great Depression.

And the nation could not look the other way."

 

and something more: I was fascinated to learn that the publication of Dorothea Lange's amazing photo, "Migrant Mother", in the San Francisco newspaper elicited aid from the government. When I read more about this photo, I found out that Dorothea almost didn't take the photo. She actually had finished her photo-taking and was headed home when she passed a "Pea-Pickers" sign and turned back twenty miles later. Serendipity!