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focus on the arts
Dorothea Lange’s
Innovative Approach to Portraiture
On Display at D.C.’s National Gallery of Art
Divided into six thematic
sections, the exhibition features
portraits ranging from
her early career as a San
Francisco studio photographer—the
earliest work is
from 1919—and her powerful
coverage of the Great Depression
through expressive photographs
of everyday people
and communities during the
1950s and early 1960s.
Head to the National Gallery
in Washington, D.C., before
March 31 of this year. It
will be worth it. It’s a wonderful
museum with a great
collection.
White Angel Breadline, San
Francisco, California, 1933 gelatin
silver print
Street Encounter, Richmond,
California, c. 1943 gelatin silver print
Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother),
March 1936 gelatin silver print
You know her for that poetic,
beautiful, but sad image of
a migrant worker, hand on
face with her two children at
her side, but Dorothea Lange
photographed so much more.
hand on face with her two children at her
side, but Dorothea Lange photographed so
much more.
Labor strikers, Japanese Americans,
American Indians, Depression soup kitchens,
pastoral Ireland and Indigenous people
in Arizona and New Mexico, migrant farmers,
rural African Americans during the Jim
Crow era, and the people she met while traveling
in Europe, Asia, Venezuela, and Egypt.
There’s compassion, but also a poetic beauty
to her images down to some of the captions
that she wrote.
This exhibit has 101 photographs and addresses
her innovative approaches to picturing
people, emphasizing her work on various
social issues including economic disparity,
migration, poverty, and racism.
Dorothea Lange: Seeing People examines
Lange’s decades-long investigation into how
portrait photography could embody the humanity
of the people she depicted. It demonstrates
how her photographs helped shape
contemporary documentary practice by connecting
everyday people with moments of
history—from the Great Depression through
the mid-1960s—that still resonate with our
lives in the 21st century.
“Throughout the course of her 50-year career,
Lange created an intensely humanistic
body of work that sought to transform how
we see and understand people,” said Kaywin
Feldman, director of the National Gallery of
Art. “Merging her skills as a portrait artist,
a social documentary photographer, and a
storyteller, she helped redefine photography
through images that emphasize social issues.”
Dorothea
Lange
About the Artist
Lange began her career as a commercial
studio photographer in San Francisco in
1918. Her studio became a gathering spot for
artists who had serious discussions about
photography and art. In 1920 she married
Maynard Dixon, a painter of western subjects,
who encouraged Lange to take her
photography outside. She accompanied him
on trips through the American Southwest,
photographing rural landscapes and Dixon
at work, along with the Indigenous communities
he was portraying.
She started to work in the streets of San
Francisco in 1933, making photographs such
as White Angel Breadline, San Francisco,
California (1933) that capture the effects of
the Great Depression and the plight of the
city’s dispossessed men and women.
Lange also photographed labor organizers
and protesters at May Day events around San
Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza: she focused
on the protesters speaking, listening, or holding
signs, and vowed to produce prints within
24 hours, as in May Day, San Francisco,
California (1934). She also documented ensuing
strikes, creating portraits of speakers
and demonstrators with placards as well as
photographs of the police presence in works
such as Street Demonstration, San Francisco
(1934). When she met the labor economist
Paul Schuster Taylor in 1934, Lange began to
photograph the plight of migrant farmers
who had moved to California from the South
and Midwest seeking new livelihoods.
From 1935 to 1943, while working for the
for the US Resettlement Administration,
Farm Security Administration, and War Re-
Children of the Weill Public School
Shown in a Flag Pledge Ceremony,
San Francisco, California, April 1942,
printed c. 1965 gelatin silver print
location Authority, Lange focused on the
resilience of Depression-era families, farmworkers,
rural cooperative communities,
migrant camps, and the forced incarceration
of Japanese Americans in the early days of
World War II. The resulting images illustrate
the human and economic impact wrought
across the United States by farm tenancy,
racism, the legacy of slavery, climate change,
and migrations. These portraits, sometimes
combined with interviews, added a personal
element to Lange’s stark pictures of makeshift
housing and agricultural fields and cemented
her documentary style.
During World War II Lange produced one
of her most powerful series for the War Relocation
Authority, depicting the forced incarceration
of California’s Japanese Americans
at Manzanar, in works on view such
as Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese
Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center,
Manzanar, California (July 1942). She
also photographed the shifts in California’s
Hopi Man, Arizona, 1923, printed 1926
gelatin silver print
social fabric as its rising economy—sparked
by growing defense industries—drew African
Americans from the South and women
into previously male-dominated and segregated
businesses such as shipbuilding. In
the 1950s, Lange continued to pursue stories
about people and their communities for personal
projects, as well as for Life magazine,
that include her first photographs from Europe.
Asia, South America, and North Africa.
Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits
of Indigenous people in Arizona and New
Mexico from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as
her depictions of striking workers, migrant
farmers, rural African Americans during
the Jim Crow era, Japanese Americans in
internment camps, and the people she met
while traveling in Europe, Asia, Venezuela,
and Egypt. Drawing on new research, Philip
Brookman, Sarah Greenough, Andrea
Nelson, and Laura Wexler, examine Lange’s
roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate
how her influential and widely seen photographs
addressed issues of identity as well
as social, economic, and racial inequalities—
topics that remain as relevant for our times
as they were for hers.
National Gallery of Art, Washington,
through March 31, 2024
East Building, 4th St
and Constitution Ave., NW
www.nga.gov/visit
MARCH 2024 WEST COAST WOMAN 23