“You know, so often it’s just sticking around and being there, remaining there, not swooping out in a cloud of dust: sitting down on the ground with people, letting children look at your camera with their dirty, grimy little hands, and putting their fingers on the lens, and you just let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you are apt to receive it, you know?” – Dorothea Lange
Early Years
Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn was born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, NJ to Heinrich Nutzhorn and Johanna Lange. Her father was a lawyer, born of German immigrants. Her mother was a soprano concert singer and later a librarian.
She grew up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and attended public school at PS 62 on Hester Street. She didn’t particularly like school and often skipped classes. School didn’t become any easier for her when, at the age of 7, she contracted polio. She survived but was left with a withered right leg, a twisted, crabbed right foot and a limp that would be with her the rest of her life. You can imagine the teasing she got from her fellow classmates. Even her mother was ashamed to take her out in public. Lange expressed her attitude about her disability this way.
“I was physically disabled, and I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been semi-crippled knows how much that means. I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me. All those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and the power of it.”
When she was twelve, her father abandoned their family. It’s not known why but he was never heard from again. Lange never spoke of him. That is when her mother took a job as a librarian and the family went to live with their grandmother, Sophie.
Continue reading “Dorothea Lange”(251)