Who is your favorite photographer and why?

Dorothea Lange is my favorite photographer, she never shot a beautiful scene. But rather showed the world the struggles people faced during the Great Depression with each and every photo she took. The message she sent with every photo made her my favorite photographer. That message was of struggles but, also of family bonds and connections. I hope to one day have powerful messages in my images like she has.

Some things about Dorothea Lange was that she was born May 26, 1895 and died on October 11. 1965 at the age of 70. She died of esophageal cancer. Her most famous work was "Migrant Mother" (picture up above). She married twice in her life. The first was Maynard Dixon a noted western painter, whom she had two sons with Daniel and John. In 1935 she divorced Dixon to marry her second husband Paul Taylor, an economist.

Some things about Paul Taylor, he had a history in the army as a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps and took command of the 4th platoon, 78th company and the 2nd battalion 6th Marines.He deployed to France in January, 1918, and participated in the Battle of Chateau-Thierry and the Battle of Belleau Wood. He was severely gassed at Belleau Wood on June 14, 1918. After recuperating he served as an instructor at the First Corps Schools in Gondrecourt until returning home in 1919. Taylor's research career was launched by the progressive sociologist Edith Abbott. she was looking for someone to undertake a study of the rapidly increasing Mexican migration into the United States. Taylor took up this task.

From 1927 to 1930 he spent a great deal of time on the road, driving through the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys in California, into Colorado and Texas, and as far east as Pennsylvania. He not only sought quantitative data on Mexican employment patterns but also learned Spanish and interviewed workers and employers. He documented everything he encountered with photographs much like I do.

In 1934 Taylor saw the work of the documentary photographer Dorothea Lange and recruited her to his project. They both divorced their first spouses and married each other in December 1935, forming a living and working partnership that continued until Lange's death in 1965. They had no children together but were parents to Lange's two sons from her first marriage as well as Taylor's three children.

In the course of their research Taylor and Lange encountered the "Dust Bowl" westward migration of ruined tenant farmers across the United States. Lange was hired as a photographer by the federal Farm Security Administration, and throughout the 1930s the two often traveled together; Taylor collecting quantitative and qualitative information as Lange made photographs.

Together Lange and Taylor brought the poverty and exploitation of sharecroppers, tenant farmers and migrant farmworkers to the attention of the American public in their hope that the New Deal would be extended to benefit those who worked on farms. Taylor risked his colleagues' further disapproval by publishing, with Lange, a popular book of text and photographs on the Dust Bowl, "American Exodus," in 1939.

Some facts of the time period. The Great Depression was going on when Lange was taking pictures. It started in 1929 and ended late 1930s. Two theories of it's cause is Keynesian or Monetarist.