White Angel Breadline
Author
Nina Zurier
Decade
1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s
Tags
Activism
Black Panthers Community Food Photography
Racial Justice
Lois Jordan’s soup kitchen on San Francisco’s Embarcadero was near Filbert Street and Dorothea Lange’s studio. Relying on donations and ingenuity, Jordan provided critical support for many destitute San Franciscans during the Great Depression. Lange had been a studio photographer for fifteen years; this was the first photograph she took on the street, and is among her most famous.
Lange arrived in San Francisco in 1918 and opened a successful portrait studio. She was married to painter Maynard Dixon for fifteen years; she later married Paul Schuster Taylor, professor of economics at UC Berkeley. Together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers. Taylor interviewed subjects and gathered economic data while Lange took photographs. Their landmark photobook An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939) weaves together text drawn from field notes, folk-song lyrics, and newspaper excerpts, as well as quotations from the people Lange photographed. In 1941 Lange was hired to record the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). A complete set of the work is held at the Bancroft Library.
Lange, Imogen Cunningham, and Minor White were among the first faculty hired by Ansel Adams for his new photography department at SFAI. In 1952, Lange was one of the founders of the photography magazine Aperture.
She continued her social documentary projects throughout her life, on several occasions working with Pirkle Jones, another SFAI photo faculty member. Their 1956 photo essay documented the destruction and dislocation of the Berryessa Valley community before it was flooded on completion of the Monticello Dam. It was first published in Aperture in 1960 as “Death of a Valley.”
From 1955 to 1957 Lange documented the day-to-day activity of Martin Pulich, a public defender in Alameda County, California. The National Lawyers Guild used some of the photographs in a book, Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials: The Voir Dire Conducted by Charles R. Garry in People of California v. Huey P. Newton (1969), after the Black Panther Party cofounder’s first trial.
NZ
From 1955 to 1957 Lange documented the day-to-day activity of Martin Pulich, a public defender in Alameda County, California. The National Lawyers Guild used some of the photographs in a book, Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials: The Voir Dire Conducted by Charles R. Garry in People of California v. Huey P. Newton (1969), after the Black Panther Party cofounder’s first trial.
NZ
Links
Dorothea Lange Archive, Oakland Museum of California
River Bullock, “Written by Dorothea Lange,” MoMA, February 2020
Maurice Berger, “Rarely Seen Photos of Japanese Internment,” New York Times Lens (blog), February 2017
Dorothea Lange Japanese Internment Photographs, Anchor Editions
Lesson for students from Getty Education using Lange's photographs
Secondary Connections
