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.
As evidenced by the stamps and labels on the reverse of this photograph, it was once in the files of Magnum, the collective photo agency founded in the late 1940s by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier Bresson, David ‘Chim’ Seymour, and other magazine photographers looking for representation outside of the conventional editorial system. Lange and her photographs were temperamentally aligned with Magnum’s idealism, and she worked with the agency in the 1950s and 1960s, supplying images from her past body of work and occasionally suggesting assignments. Lange’s oldest son, the writer Daniel Dixon, was employed in Magnum’s New York office in 1954.
It is not known when this print of White Angel Breadline entered Magnum. Shortly after her death in 1965, a selection of Lange’s best-known images was sent to Magnum by her assistant, Richard Conrat, with the understanding that Magnum would make high-quality copy negatives and then return the prints to Lange’s studio. By 1989, it was unclear whether these materials had been returned, prompting Lange’s younger son, John Dixon, to write to Magnum: ‘I have not seen anything in the files which indicate one way or the other whether or not that return was accomplished. Would you please check your files and advise me of this matter? If you still have them or any other of her original prints, we, her family, would like to have them.’ The Magnum label dated 1995 on the reverse of this print suggests its return was made in the subsequent decade.
The photographs in Dorothea Lange: The Family Collection 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.