";s:4:"text";s:4740:" With her husband, muralist Maynard Dixon, she had two sons and settled into the comfortable middle-class life she’d known as a child.Following high school, she attended the New York Training School for Teachers in 1913. The daughter of second- generation German immigrants, she adopted her mother’s maiden name, Lange, when she opened a portrait studio in San Francisco in 1918.
“[It] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me,” she said.Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.American photographer Cindy Sherman is known for her elaborately "disguised" self-portraits that focus on social role-playing and sexual stereotypes.Aaron Douglas was an African American painter and graphic artist who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.Art and literature were big parts of Lange’s upbringing. 'Amiri Baraka is an African American poet, activist and scholar. She also accompanied her husband on his work-related assignments in Pakistan, Korea and Vietnam, among other places, documenting what she saw along the way.In 1983, astronaut and astrophysicist Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the space shuttle Challenger.When she was 7, Lange contracted polio, which left her right leg and foot noticeably weakened. With the onslaught of the Great Depression in the 1930s, she trained her camera on what she started to see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes and breadlines.While she battled increasing health problems over the last two decades of her life, Lange stayed active. "As Taylor would later note, Lange’s access to the inner lives of these struggling Americans was the result of patience and careful consideration of the people she photographed. Her parents were both strong advocates for her education, and exposure to creative works filled her childhood.One of the preeminent and pioneering documentary photographers of the 20th century, Lange was born Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Lang is known for such country hits as "Crying" and "I'm Down to My Last Cigarette," and for the successful pop single "Constant Craving. “Her method of work,” Taylor later said, “was often to just saunter up to the people and look around, and then when she saw something that she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera, look at it, and if she saw that they objected, why, she would close it up and not take a photograph, or perhaps she would wait until… they were used to her.”In the early 1930s, Lange, mired in an unhappy marriage, met Paul Taylor, a university professor and labor economist. Her parents separated when Lange was 12, and she later assumed her mother’s maiden name. He was an influential Black nationalist and later became a Marxist.