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Dorothea Lange’s photographs put a face to nearly every major historical event of the twentieth century, including the Dust Bowl, Depression, and Japanese American Internment, but her story, both as a photographer and as a woman, really began in San Francisco.
It was in San Francisco that she transformed herself from a “cripple” with a traumatic background into a brilliant, passionate, and gutsy artist. It was here that her photographs first became infused with a deep and abiding dedication to documenting the lives of the have-nots in our country—those banished to the fringes by poverty, hardship, forced migration, and discrimination.