Dorothea Lange 1938 Kern County, CA Gas Station Photo Reproduction | "AIR This Is Your Country Don't Let The Big Men Take It Away From You"
This Kern County gas station by Dorothea Lange is located in Kern County California, and is another example of Lange's interest in capturing interesting hand-painted signs. Kern County, CA is north of Los Angeles, California. Lange photographed this image in 1938 "AIR This is YOUR Country Don't Let the Big Men Take It Away From You".
ABOUT DOROTHEA LANGE
Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.
Born of second generation German immigrants on May 26, 1895, at 1041 Bloomfield Street, Hoboken, New Jersey to Heinrich Nutzhorn and Johanna Lange. Dorothea Lange was named Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn at birth. She had a younger brother, Martin. She dropped her middle name and assumed her mother's maiden name after her father abandoned the family when she was 12 years old, one of two traumatic incidents early in her life.
The other was her contraction of polio at age seven which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp. "It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," Lange once said of her altered gait. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.
Lange graduated from the Wadleigh High School for Girls and although she had never operated or owned a camera, she was adamant that she would become a photographer upon graduating high school. Lange was educated in photography at Columbia University in New York City, in a class taught by Clarence H. White.
She was informally apprenticed to several New York photography studios, including that of the famed Arnold Genthe. In 1918, she left New York with a female friend to travel the world, but was forced to end the trip in San Francisco due to a robbery and settled there, working as a photo finisher at a photographic supply shop. While working at this shop,
Lange became acquainted with other photographers and met an investor that aided in the establishment of a successful portrait studio. This business supported Lange and her family for the next 15 years. She lived across the bay in Berkeley for the rest of her life. In 1920, she married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons, Daniel, born in 1925, and John, born in 1930.
With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people, starting with White Angel Breadline (1933) which depicted a lone man facing away from the crowd in front of a soup kitchen run by a widow known as the White Angel, captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).
In December 1935, she and Dixon divorced and she married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. For the next five years they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers – Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos.
Working for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration, they brought the plight of the poor and forgotten – particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers – to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era. In 1945, Lange was invited by Ansel Adams to accept a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), now known as the San Francisco Art Institute.
Imogen Cunningham and Minor White joined as well. In 1952, she co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. Lange and Pirkle Jones were commissioned in the mid-1950s to shoot a photographic documentary for Life magazine of the death of Monticello, California and of the displacement of its residents by the damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa.
The magazine did not run the piece, so Lange devoted one whole issue of Aperture to the work. The photo collection was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960. Another series for Life magazine which she began in 1954 featured Martin Pulich, a lawyer, due to her interest in how poor people were defended in the court system which by one account grew out of her experience with her brother’s arrest and trial.
In the last two decades of her life, Lange's health was poor. She suffered from gastric problems as well as post-polio syndrome – although this renewal of the pain and weakness of polio was not yet recognized by most physicians. Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco, California, at age 70. She was survived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three stepchildren, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Three months later, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a retrospective show of her work, which Lange herself had helped to curate. In 2003 Lange was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 2006 an elementary school was named in her honor in Nipomo, California, near the site where she photographed Migrant Mother.
In 2008 she was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. Her son Daniel Dixon accepted the honor in her place.
OUR GICLEE PRINTS
Your print(s) will be created using archival, fade-resistant, pigment inks, heavyweight, museum-quality paper, or canvas, and a 11-color process fine-art printer to ensure the most vivid, detailed and long-lasting print. To prevent fading, as with all prints, please never expose them to direct sunlight. To protect your investment, we recommend that you mat and frame your prints.
There is no mat or frame included with this print, other than the high quality basswood frames that are standard with our ready-to-hang gallery wrapped canvas print options.
SIZE INFO
This Kern County gas station by Dorothea Lange print is offered in square sizes from 8" x 8" through 40" x 40" in two inch increments. The print you will receive will measure exactly the dimensions you ordered.
BORDERS
Our fine art paper and canvas prints are carefully positioned with an approximate 1/8" border on all sides for matting and framing adjustments. This may vary slightly based on the size of print you order and the size of the original image. If you would like a different size border, or need to know the exact border size, or a borderless print, just let me know when you place your order.
SHIPPING INFO
I ship worldwide in one business day after receiving your paid order. Your prints are protected with Glassine wrapping and shipped in a rigid "Do Not Bend" mailer to ensure it arrives in the same condition as when it was shipped, and for larger sizes, we ship in a sturdy cardboard tube. Your print will arrive safely, or I will replace it.
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