Dorothea lange accomplishments of hillary

Dorothea Lange's photo humanised the Great Depression and greatly influenced documentary photography

It was during the depths of the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 30s, when around 15 million people were out of work in the US, that Dorothea Lange - born this day, May 26, in 1895 - took to the streets with her camera. Lange's photographs did much to humanise the awful consequences of the Great Depression and greatly influenced the development of documentary photography.

Born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn, Lange dropped her middle name in favour of her mother's maiden name when her father abandoned the family when she was 12-years-old. At the age of seven she had contracted polio which had left her with a permanent limp. 

"It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," Lange once said of her resulting altered gait. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."

Lange took the photo Migrant Mother in California in 1936. The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson. As The Photography Book reveals, Florence was discovered by Lange at an iced-up pea picker’s camp in the Nipomo Valley in California at the end of the photographer’s extensive journey through Southern California, New Mexico and Arizona.

The woman was thirty-two and living in a tent with her children. She had just sold the tyres from her car to buy food, and told Lange that her family was living on frozen vegetables from the fields and on birds killed by her children.

The photograph was one of five taken in March 1936. Roy Stryker, who organized the documentary work of the Farm Security Administration, thought of it as the organization’s ultimate image. Here, as elsewhere, Lange shows herself to be a realist, holding to the idea that one understands and symp

Famous and Infamous Moms

Mother Teresa, Rose Kennedy, and other notable mothers

Mother's Day is the one day when we take time to express our love and gratitude for the women who have devoted their lives to making ours safe and happy. Here's a list of mothers who've achieved fame not only for their many diverse accomplishments, but also because they have distinguished themselves in their roles as mothers.

Political Matriarchs

Coretta Scott King
After the 1968 assassination of her husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., Scott King carried out his legacy by continuing his crusade for civil rights. She created the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Ga., and she fought for 15 years to have him honored with a national holiday. She also devoted much of her life to children. In fact, the American Library Association named an award in her honor. The Coretta Scott King Awards recognize African American authors and illustrators whose children's books "promote an understanding and appreciation of the American Dream."

Rose Kennedy
She buried five of her nine children, raised a president, two U.S senators, and presided over one of the most famous families in American history—all with elegance and dignity. "I looked on child-rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring it," Kennedy once said. When she died at age 104, she had 28 grandchildren and 41 great-grandchildren.

Hillary Rodham Clinton
After weathering eight years in the White House and Bill's series of humiliating sexcapdes, Hillary Clinton emerged from her husband's shadow and forged her own political career, having been elected to the U.S. Senate fr

1. 'Migrant Mother,' 1936, California

In 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange shot this image of a destitute woman, 32-year-old Florence Owens, with an infant and two other of her seven children at a pea-pickers camp in Nipomo, California. Lange took the photo, which came to be called “Migrant Mother,” for a project commissioned by the New Deal’s Federal Resettlement Administration (later part of the Farm Security Administration) to document the plight of migrant agricultural workers. Her image of Owens soon was published in newspapers, prompting the government to deliver food aid to the Nipomo camp, where several thousand people were hungry and living in squalid conditions; however, by that point Owens and her family had moved on.

Lange’s photo became a defining image of the Great Depression, but the migrant mother’s identity remained a mystery to the public for decades because Lange hadn’t asked her name. In the late 1970s, a reporter tracked down Owens (whose last name was then Thompson), at her Modesto, California, home. Thompson was critical of Lange, who died in 1965, stating she felt exploited by the photo and wished it hadn’t been taken and also expressing regret she hadn’t made any money from it. Thompson died at age 80 in 1983. In 1998, a print of the image, signed by Lange, sold for $244,500 at auction.

2. 'Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima,' 1945, Mt. Suribachi

On February 23, 1945, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal shot this photo of five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising a U.S. flag on Mt. Suribachi, the highest point on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. The battle, one of the bloodiest in Marine Corps history, began on February 19, 1945, when the Americans invaded the heavily fortified island; four days later, they seized it and planted a small flag atop Mt. Suribachi. However, later that same day, the flag was ordered replaced with a much larger one that could be seen by troops across the island and on ships offshore. Rosenthal’s

A long time ago I wrote a book about goalkeeping. I tried to persuade the publisher to put on the cover one of the number of Roger Mayne’s street pictures which so eloquently describes the business of keeping goal in games of street football. The publisher refused, saying that something more like the commercial experience of watching sport in a stadium would sell more copies, but still allowed me to put one of Mayne’s on the back cover of the hardback issue [1].

Mayne’s pictures would fall comfortably into a number of the categorisations of photography. They are street photographs, documentary photographs, sports photographs, photographs of childhood… . They have historical interest, social interest, a certain ethnographic or anthropological quality. If one were keywording for a picture library, they would also be filed by the superficial descriptions of the people within them, street names and the wider district, the date, perhaps the type of camera or film used. These overlapping descriptions would place them in a context of other pictures, more or less similar, more or less connected. We are used to this kind of external classification of photographs and use versions of it all the time. That’s how we search on Google, order our hard drives, label archives. It’s completely standard and while individual classifiers don’t always agree, the system itself is beyond question, like the Dewey decimal system for libraries or the SI units.

People write of ‘tropes’ in photography and that seems an extension of the same filing system.  The tropes are external categorisations of pictures, even where they are expected (or analysed) to have an internal, emotional effect. So, for a single example from something I was reading recently in another context, Marta Zarzycka discusses the functioning of visual tropes in regard to a particular picture by Sa