Great Black and White Photographers Part II

          Dorothea Langue was born on May 16, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey, but was a second generation German. She was important to the humanization of the results from the Great depression, and was a great influence to documentary photography. When Langue was only seven, she was diagnosed with Polio, and she never entirely overcame it. When she turned 12, her father abandoned her along with her mother and sisters. The two tragedies marked her greatly. 

          Langue studied photography at the Columbia University in New York City. She opened a successful portrait studio in 1919. She married a painter in 1920 (Maynard Dixon) and they had two sons. Her interest and study of the homeless captured attention from many people, and she was soon employed by the FSA. 

          She divorced Dixon in 1935 and married Paul Schuster Taylor, an economics professor who would later become her teacher. Langue's brought attention to the poor and forgotten. Her best known photograph is known as "Migrant Mother". In 1941, she was awarded for her excellence in photography with a Guggenheim Fellowship, but she later gave it up due to Pearl Harbor. 

          Langue's photographies where so critical that the Army decided to use them. In 1945 she was offered a position as faculty in the first fine arts department. In 1952 she co founded the Aperture magazine, she shoot a photographic documentary for the Life magazine, but it was never published. she eventually published it in Aperture.
          She lived the last years of her life in poor health, and died of esophageal Cancer on October 11, 1965 when she was 70.
          The Whitney Museum later used many of her photographs. One of her sons accepted the honor of her name being forever mesmerized in the California Hall of Fame. A school was later built in her honor, just around the place where she photographed "Migrant Mother".