Richmond, California

1935–1940

Five years on the road with Paul Taylor

For the next five years the couple travelled the California coast and the Midwest, documenting rural poverty, above all the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant labourers: Taylor interviewed people and gathered economic data while Lange made photographs and the accompanying records. They lived and worked from Berkeley for the rest of her life.

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.

1945

Ansel Adams invites her to teach photography

In 1945 Ansel Adams invited Lange to teach in the first fine-art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute); Imogen Cunningham and Minor White also joined the faculty.

c. 1965

Helps to curate her MoMA retrospective

Shortly before her death Lange helped curate a retrospective of her work for the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it opened three months after she died and was MoMA’s first solo retrospective of a woman photographer.

11. Oktober 1965

Died