Unshuttered Lens: Dorothea Lange, Documentary Photography, And Government Work, 1935-1945 (TEACHING WITH ONLINE PRIMARY SOURCES: DOCUMENTS FROM THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES‪)‬

In November 1940, on Arizona State Highway 87, south of Chandler, in Maricopa County, Dorothea Lange took a photograph of a mother and four small children. Caught in the powerful forces of the Great Depression, this migrant family's plight was used to drive government relief policy. Twenty months later, at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California, Lange photographed another family: a Japanese American family whose migration was intentional, forced by government order. Understanding that government reports from the New Deal's "alphabet agencies" alone did not always grab the attention of Congress or the public, the Roosevelt administration hired photographers, including Dorothea Lange, to get its message across. Lange was initially employed by the Resettlement Administration (RA), which later became the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), and later was employed by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) and the Office of War Information (OWI). In these positions, her photography did more than satisfy the government's primary purpose of creating an informational record. Her work focused on the government's policies and their impact on people.