Dorothea Lange's America
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© Dorothea Lange/Oakland Museum of California
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You force yourself to watch and wait. You accept all the discomfort and the disharmony. Being out of your depth is a very uncomfortable thing. You force yourself onto strange streets, among strangers. It may be very hot. It may be painfully cold. It may be sandy and windy and you say, ‘What am I doing here? What drives me to do this hard thing?’-- Dorothea Lange
art2art is proud to present a focused exhibition of original lifetime prints by the legendary documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. Highlighting this show are oversized exhibition prints of her seminal portraits from the Great Depression, including White Angel Breadline, Migratory Farm Worker, and, most famously,Migrant Mother – an emblematic picture that came to personify pride and resilience in the face of abject poverty in 1930s America. |
Lange herself had known adversity early in life. At age 7 she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifetime limp. And at age 12 her father disappeared from the scene, leaving an impoverished household behind. Every day she would ride the ferry with her mother from Hoboken to lower Manhattan, to a roiling working-class neighborhood teeming with immigrants. During that period Lange talked her way into photo courses with a range of teachers as diverse as Arnold Genthe and Clarence White. In 1918 she moved to San Francisco where she befriended the photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and, through them, the celebrated Western painter Maynard Dixon, who became her first husband. She soon opened a thriving portrait studio that catered to San Francisco’s professional class and monied elite. But with the crash of 1929 she found her true calling, as a peripatetic chronicler of the many faces of America, old and young, urban and rural, native-born and immigrant, as they dealt with unprecedented hardship, sometimes with resilience, often with despondence. Her immortal portraits seared these faces of the Depression era into America’s consciousness.
Number of photographs:30
Rental fee: $6200 for 8 weeks
Also available is an expanded version of the exhibition, in which Lange’s work is supplemented by that of other notable social documentarians of the era, including Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Wright Morris, Mike Disfarmer, and others.
Extended Show:
Number of photographs:55
Rental fee: $10,500 for 8 weeks
Recommended publications
Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime (Aperture Monograph, 2005)
by Robert Coles, Dorothea Lange, and Therese Heyman
Online Resources:
The History Place, by Dorothea Lange
From Library of Congress
Collection at the Oakland Museum of California
Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime (Aperture Monograph, 2005)
by Robert Coles, Dorothea Lange, and Therese Heyman
Online Resources:
The History Place, by Dorothea Lange
From Library of Congress
Collection at the Oakland Museum of California
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