[7] Growing up on Manhattan's Lower East Side, she attended PS 62 on Hester Street, where she was "one of the only gentiles—quite possibly the only—in a class of 3,000 Jews.

"[6] Lange graduated from the Wadleigh High School for Girls, New York City;[9] by this time, even though she had never owned or operated a camera, she had already decided that she would become a photographer.

[7] Lange's early studio work mostly involved shooting portrait photographs of the social elite in San Francisco.

In the depths of the worldwide depression, in 1933, some fourteen million people in the U.S. were out of work; many were homeless, drifting aimlessly, often without enough food to eat.

Lange began to photograph these luckless folk, leaving her studio to document their lives in the streets and roads of California.

[16] Lange's photographic studies of the unemployed and homeless—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[17]—captured the attention of local photographers and media, and eventually led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Lange developed personal techniques of talking with her subjects while working, putting them at ease and enabling her to document pertinent remarks to accompany the photography.

[16] Lange and Dixon divorced on October 28, 1935, and on December 6 she married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

[20] According to Thompson's son, while Lange got some details of the story wrong, the impact of the photograph came from an image that projected both the strengths and needs of migrant workers.

[21] Twenty-two of Lange's photographs produced for the FSA were included in John Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies when it was first published in 1936 in The San Francisco News.

[24] After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the fellowship in order to go on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to document the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the west coast of the US.

[25] She covered the internment of Japanese Americans[26] and their subsequent incarceration, traveling throughout urban and rural California to photograph families required to leave their houses and hometowns on orders of the government.

Lange visited several temporary assembly centers as they opened, eventually fixing on Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps (located in eastern California, some 300 miles from the coast).

[30][31] Today her photography of the evacuations and internments is available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

In the mid-1950s, Life magazine commissioned Lange and Pirkle Jones to shoot a documentary about the death of the town of Monticello, California, and the subsequent displacement of its residents by the damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa.

Three months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a retrospective of her work that Lange had helped to curate.

That characteristic has caused "art purists" and "political purists" alike to criticize Lange's work, which Arn argues is unfair: "The relationship between image and story", Arn notes, was often altered by Lange's employers as well as by government forces when her work did not suit their commercial purposes or undermined their political purposes.

[8] In his review of this exhibition, critic Brian Wallis also stressed the distortions in the "afterlife of photographs" that often went contrary to Lange's intentions.

[41] Finally, Jackson Arn situates Lange's work alongside other Depression-era artists such as Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Frank Capra, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood in terms of their role creating a sense of the national "We".