American documentary photographer, the central figure of the Farm Security Administration's visual record of the Great Depression and the author of some of the most widely reproduced photographs in American history. Her image of Florence Owens Thompson holding her children in a California pea-pickers' camp in March 1936 — titled Migrant Mother — has become a near-inescapable shorthand for the entire Depression era.
Trained in portrait photography in New York under Clarence White, Lange opened a San Francisco studio in 1919 and spent a decade photographing the city's wealthy. The break came in 1932 when she began turning her camera on the unemployed men in the streets outside her studio door; the resulting picture White Angel Breadline (1933) carried her into the new field of documentary social photography. Working from 1935 with the economist Paul Schuster Taylor (her second husband) and then under Roy Stryker's FSA program, she produced the body of work that stands beside Walker Evans's as the central American documentary achievement of the decade: the dust-bowl migration into California (her 1939 book with Taylor, An American Exodus), the Hoovervilles, the migrant camps, the tenant farmers of the South, the long lines of the displaced and the looking-for-work.
During the Second World War she was hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the forced relocation of Japanese Americans; her photographs of the Manzanar and Tule Lake processing centers were sufficiently accusatory that the Army impounded most of them for the duration of the war, and they did not reach a public audience until the 1970s. After the war she photographed Mormon communities in Utah, the Public Defender's office in Oakland, and — after her husband's UN assignments — in Egypt, Ireland, and Vietnam. She curated her own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, The American Country Woman, months before her death in 1965.
Lange's work stands in the American documentary tradition with Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks, but is distinctive for the extended caption-and-photograph form she worked out with Taylor — in which the words the subjects spoke were recorded and published with the picture, not replaced by the photographer's explanation.