dorothea lange
One of the most noted documentary photographers of the last century, Lange is known primarily for her searing images of the Depression. In 1942 she recorded the forced evacuation and illegal incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The photographs were suppressed for nearly fifty years. She also produced powerful documents of environmental destruction and its ravages, including a series about Monticello, a Napa County farming community where 500 people lived before it was drowned in 1957. She died in San Francisco in October 1965 at the age of 70.
maynard dixon
Considered one of the finest painters of the American West, Maynard Dixon left San Francisco not long after his divorce from Dorothea Lange in 1935. He settled permanently in the Southwest, where he married the muralist Edith Hamlin and continued to paint. They split their time between Utah and Arizona, where he died in 1946.
consuelo kanaga
A renegade photographer and journalist, Consuelo Kanaga got her start in San Francisco but ventured far and wide over the course of her career. Like Lange, she showed a lifelong devotion to documenting the lives of the disenfranchised and the poor. Her portraits of African Americans differ dramatically from the frequently condescending and impersonal photographs taken by photographers of her generation. She died in February 1978 in New York, where she’d lived for several decades after leaving California.
imogen cunningham
Cunningham and Lange remained close friends all their lives. In the 1930s she joined with like-minded photographers, including Ansel Adams, to form Group f/64, a group of photographers committed to a new modernist aesthetic based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects. Cunningham, like Lange, eventually turned to documentary street photography, supporting herself with her commercial and studio work. She continued to take photographs until just before her death at age 93 in June 1976, in San Francisco, California.
ansel adams
Adams’s photographs of Yosemite are among the most popular and enduring of all time. Both longtime residents of the Bay Area, Adams and Lange collaborated on several occasions. Their radically different treatments of the Japanese Internment in 1942 foregrounded their temperamental and artistic differences, yet they were good friends and faithful champions of each other’s work.
mabel dodge luhan
After presiding over one of the most famous salons in American history, Mabel moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1918, where she established an artists’ colony, put on some of the first exhibitions of Pueblo and Hispano Art, and advocated for the rights of the Taos Pueblo Indians. In 1923, she married her fourth husband, Tony Luhan, a Native American to whom she remained married for the rest of her life. Mabel’s guests also included Georgia O’Keefe, Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, and Willa Cather.
donaldina cameron
In her forty-seven years at San Francisco’s Presbyterian Mission House for Girls, Cameron rescued nearly three thousand women and girls forced to work as prostitutes and household servants. Working with lawmakers and other civic groups, she helped eradicate the slave trade that flourished into the 1930s in San Francisco and also helped enact state and federal laws for Chinese people across the United States. She died in 1968 at the age of ninety-eight and is buried in Northern California alongside her onetime charge and eventual colleague, Tien Fuh Wu.
