I LOVE Dorothea Lange's Photos

It's the birthday of photographer and author Dorothea Lange, born in Hoboken, New Jersey (1895). A bout with polio at the age of seven left Lange with a noticeable limp - and a hatred for school, where she was teased and alienated. She cut classes and wondered around New York City, carefully observing the life around her. She soon decided she wanted to become a photographer. While training to be a teacher, she apprenticed with several photographers. In 1918, she decided she could earn her way around the world taking pictures. She got as far as San Francisco, where she opened a portrait studio, and later met and married the painter Maynard Dixon. But by the late 1920s, she was too disturbed by the Depression to make photographs of rich clients.

She began to go out on the street, and took what became one of the most famous photographs of the time, called White Angel Breadline. It depicted a crowd of well-dressed, newly unemployed men waiting for food on a breadline. In 1939, she and her husband published An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, which dealt with the problems of America's migrant farmworkers.

She said: "One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it."

-Writer's Almanac