In 1918, at the age of 23, Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) and a close friend set out to see the world. They drove from New York City to San Francisco, where they were robbed, thus ending their youthful adventures on the road. Lange then fell in love with the San Francisco scene and opened a photo studio where she took portraits of the city’s bohemian and artistic elite. Then the Great Depression hit, and everything changed.
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One day in 1933, Lange is said to have looked out the window at a bread line that started near her downtown San Francisco studio. “Lange dared to venture out with her bulky camera, taking the picture we now know as ‘White Angel Bread Line’,” says Sarah Hermanson Meister, curator of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures and accompanying exhibition catalogue (The Museum of the Modern Art).
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“Once she took that picture, it’s as if she never looked back. Her sense of commitment to equity, justice, and paying attention to those less fortunate then became the hallmark of her career.”
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