Photographic Equality: Dorothea Lange, Her Migrant Mother, and the Nisei Internees

“The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West. In the daylight they scuttled like bugs to the westward; and as the dark caught them, they clustered like bugs near to shelter and to water. And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious place, they huddled together; they talked together, they shared their lives, their food and the things they hoped for in the new country.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939.

Big things often emerge from small packages, and so it was with Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn’s life.

Dorothea was born into a Lutheran family in the Jewish neighborhood of Hoboken, New Jersey, on May 25, 1895. Her father, Henry, an attorney, walked out on her mother, Joan, when Dorothea was 12. To survive, Joan worked in a New York City library, and later for the probation courts.

The child attended primary school, but would have skipped out endlessly, if she could, to walk the neighborhoods of life, and spend time in museums and galleries, viewing the art she so loved. Dorothea preferred visualizing life rather than writing it down, though her best field-notes in the 1930s were to be insight-driven and literate.

Dorothea’s ancestry was German, on both sides. Three brothers to her mother had been trained as lithographers in Germany, before they came to America. After Henry Nutzhorn absconded, Joan, Dorothea, and Dorothea’s younger brother, Henry Martin, would move in with Joan’s mother, Sophie Vottler.

When Joan took the job with the probation courts, it required she visit the homes of those involved. Dorothea sometimes accompanied her mother. The experience would prove invaluable.

Joan kept notes on her home visits, and Dorothea, it seems, read some of these. Walking with a limp wasn’t slowing Dorothea down enough to prevent her from wanting to see the world.

The limp derived from her bout with polio at age seven, which left her right leg partially paralyzed and wizened, principally from the knee down. She couldn’t flex the front of her foot for the rest of her life.