White Angel Breadline, one of Dorothea Lange’s most compelling images, has become a definitive representation of the human toll taken by the Depression. This photograph pre-dates her work for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), and set the template for the humanistic approach she continued to pursue throughout her career.
In 1933, Lange operated her own portrait studio in San Francisco and catered to an affluent clientele. As she recounted many times, however, she could not ignore the growing number of newly unemployed people in the city, and she took to the street, camera in hand, to explore the situation. One early outing brought her to a breadline operated by a wealthy woman, known as the White Angel, who dispensed food to those in need. Lange exposed three negatives there, with her 3 ¼-by-4 ½ Graflex camera, each taken from a slightly different vantage point. The image offered here is the definitive one from this series and has become emblematic of human resilience in troubled times.
The photographs in Dorothea Lange: The Family Collection, Part Two were in the photographer’s collection at the time of her death and thenceforth passed to her descendants. The images represent the entirety of Lange’s career as one of the foremost documentary photographers of the 20th century, from work made before her engagement with the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration, in the 1930s, to the travel photography that absorbed her in her final years, as well as more personal images of her family. Each print bears a Family Collection stamp on the reverse.