Torso, San Francisco

1933

Leaves the studio for the streets

For fifteen years her portrait studio supported her family, with San Francisco’s social elite as her sitters; but during the Great Depression Lange left the studio for the streets and roads of California to document the lives of the unemployed and the homeless, and found her calling as a documentary photographer.

1935

Married: Paul Schuster Taylor

28 October 1935

Divorce from Maynard Dixon

Lange and Dixon divorced on 28 October 1935, and on 6 December she married Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

1936

Nipomo: aid is sent to the camp after her photographs

On her way home from weeks of shooting, Lange drove past a camp of pea-pickers at Nipomo, turned back and made five exposures of a woman with her children, Florence Owens Thompson. She showed the pictures to a San Francisco newspaper editor, who informed the federal authorities and published an article, and the government rushed aid to the camp to prevent starvation.

1941–1942

Gives up her Guggenheim Fellowship for the WRA

In 1941 Lange became the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for photography, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor she gave it up to work for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), documenting the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the US West Coast.

c. 1942

Photographing the removal of Japanese Americans: Manzanar

Lange travelled through the towns and countryside of California photographing families that the government ordered out of their homes; she visited several temporary assembly centres as they opened and settled on Manzanar, the first of the permanent camps, in eastern California about 300 miles from the coast. The authorities impounded most of these photographs, and they were not seen publicly during the war.