Dorothea Lang
“This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?” These are the words Dorothea Lang spoke after capturing a photograph of the poor living conditions of a Japanese Internment Camp. During the first few months of the war between America and Japan, the United States government ordered over one hundred and ten thousand Japanese-Americans to be sent to internment camps. The government originally hired Lang to convince the American people that the internees were being treated fairly and international law was not being violated. However, the government decided Lang’s photographs were controversial and impounded them. They have recently begun to resurface such as Lang’s photograph of a boy behind a barbed wire fence (
Lang first began to photograph in the 1920s when she traveled the southwest with her new husband Maynard Dixon. She photographed Native Americans and similar to her documentaries of the internment camps, they too show the sufferings. Lang then began to photograph the deprivations of the Great Depression during the 30’s, such as her most known photograph Migrant Mother (1936, 2.77, p. 216). This photograph is of a thirty-two year old mother with six children. The pea crop that the mother was working at had been frozen, so there was no work. This photograph made a difference in many peoples’ lives who were living in poverty. The government shipped food to migrant camps because the picture was published. This photograph has been used as a symbol of the poor in generations since.
Lang contrasts the pale skin of the baby and the darkened skin from sun exposure while working in the fields of the rest of the characters by using value. Lang also uses space by tightly

cropping the photo around the figure of the woman, which creates an emphasis on the body language and facial expression rather than the setting. Lang also uses line to draw attention to the mother’s face. The woman’s arm is a vertical line and the woman and children are arranged in a pyramid shape, again to emphasize the mother’s face. In the internment camp photograph Lang uses space to not only incorporate the chain-link fence, but the barbed wire on top as if the Japanese-Americans were animals. Lang also uses space to bring the horse stalls that were used as boarding for the internees into view. She also uses value by making the photo lighter around the internees face to emphasize it. Lang uses line, as well, to emphasize the viewer’s attention on the internee’s face by making a horizontal line from the baby’s face to the internee’s face.
Dorothea Lang’s photographs are all similar in a way that they raise ethical questions and provoke society to correct the injustices that are alive not only in the United States, but all over the world. As far as the elements and principles of art go, Lange used basically the same ones in her documentary photographs; mainly value, especially using black and white in all of her photos.

Works Cited
"Our Story: American History Stories and Activities You Can Do Together." Our Story: Activities: Life in a WWII Japanese-American Internment Camp: More Information. Web. 1 Dec. 2015. <http://amhistory.si.edu/ourstory/activities/internment/more.html>.

Dewitte, Debra J., Ralph Larmann, and M. Kathryn Shields. Gateways to Art: Understanding the Visual Arts. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012. 216. Print.