Taking photographs may seem simple, but being a photographer is much more than flicking through the viewfinder and pressing the exposure button. A photographer must know how to analyze the scene, speak with words that language cannot and reach people's souls through an image. During the Great Depression, many photographers captured scenes of poverty and pain. However, there was only one photographer who truly captured the soul of Americans. According to Roy Stryker, Dorothea Lange “had the greatest sensitivity and the best rapport with people” (Stryker and Wood 41). Dorothea Lange was a phenomenal photographer who won the hearts of people in the 1930s and beyond, and greatly influenced the times of the Great Depression. Dorothea Lange was born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. When she was seven, she became lame due to polio. Polio left her right leg crippled from the knee down. Dorothea said in reference to her childhood illness that "I think it was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me. It shaped me, guided me, taught me, helped me, and humbled me" (Sufrin 75). When she was twelve, her father abandoned the family and she never saw or heard from him again. Her mother found work on New York's Lower East Side, and Dorothea attended public school there. She attended an all-girls school called Wadleigh High School. During his high school years he didn't have many friends. However, being a loner helped her develop traits that helped her as a photographer. “In the absence of friends and a social life as a teenager, Lange spent time viewing and appreciating the visual images he saw in the daily life of New York City's diverse and busy neighborhoods” (Oliver). ... in the middle of paper ... and fortitude in the midst of suffering, and his extraordinary ability to capture the human spirit have so ennobled his photographs that many of them, although annotated in time and place, are timeless" (Newall 7). He left a great impression on the people of the 1930s; his photographs will continue to capture the hearts of people in the present and future, because his photographs will remain a great legacy of the history of the United States. Works Cited Newall, Beaumont. Dorothea Lange's Commentary on American Country Women. Lange, Dorothea Forth Worth: The Amon Carter Museum, 1978. Oliver, Dorothea Lange, 7 December 2003. and Nancy Wood Heritage, August 1973: 41. Sufrin, Mark Focus on America: Profiles of Nine New York Photographers: Charles Scribner, 1987.