Out of Rear Window Tenement Dwelling of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Solomon, 133 Avenue D, New York City

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange graduated from a progressive women’s high school in New York with a lifelong sense of social responsibility. She is known for her landmark documentary photographs made for the federal government during the Great Depression, primarily in the West. This photograph is part of an understudied series of tenement life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The Solomons were one of thirty-four Jewish families working in the city’s garment industry who were being resettled to a newly constructed New Deal community in Hightstown, New Jersey. Each family was offered a modern home (designed by the young architect Louis I. Kahn), a small plot of land for raising garden vegetables, and an opportunity to work in a modern cooperative factory.