One of Dorothea Lange’s most famous photographs, White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, depicts a grizzled older man leaning over a railing and cradling an empty tin mug as he waits for food, surrounded by the backs of other unemployed men. The 1932 photograph starkly captures both the man’s lonely, stoic dignity and the shattering effects of the Great Depression.
It also marked a turning point in Lange’s career. After working as a portrait photographer in San Francisco for a decade, in 1928 she had opened a studio in a (still standing) pre–Civil War building at 802 Montgomery Street. When the Depression hit, she could look out her window and see unemployed men milling around. There was a vacant lot on the Embarcadero where they went to receive food handouts. Lange was told to avoid that tract and the men. But one day she decided to go anyway. She came upon a crowd of men waiting to get a hot meal. Her gaze fell on a man in a battered hat clutching a tin cup. She took his picture. It was the first time Lange had ever taken photographs on the street.
