Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California 1936 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
London’s ongoing season of photo riches rolls on with Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing at the Barbican Art Gallery. Judith Schrut has been to see the show.
Whether this is your first exposure to Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) and her remarkable photographs or you’re a lifelong admirer, this is a must-see exhibition. I was surprised to learn it’s the first ever retrospective of her work in the UK.
There are over 300 vintage prints and other items on display, tracing Lange’s artistic development from running a successful portrait studio in 1920s San Francisco through her lifelong mission as a documentarian of poverty and injustice in America.
Although I’m in the category of long term admirer, until this show I wasn’t aware that Lange began as a portrait photographer running her own business, surely a rare thing for a twenty-something woman at the time, even in bohemian SF. Importantly, it was here she first met and mingled with those at the heart of California’s creative community, notably Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, John Steinbeck and her future husband, social economist Paul Schuster Taylor.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Lange was hired as a photographer by one of President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ agencies, the FSA. From that moment on, Lange focussed her formidable filmic gaze on the unemployed and the destitute, on refugees, migrants and other victims of racial or social prejudice. The show includes her many pictures of urban breadlines, families walking bone-dry highways and portraits of cotton pickers, sharecroppers and stoop workers, their human dignity delicate but intact despite ragged clothes, shoeless feet, and social security numbers tattooed on arms. There’s a whole room dedicated to Lange’s most recognisable work, Migrant Mother 1936, including the fascinating photo backstory to Lange’s singular shot of this 32 year-old pea picker and mother of 7.
Dorothea Lange, Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California, 1942, the Oakland Museum of California
But for me the most moving images are the rarely seen photographs from one of the most shameful and hidden periods of U.S. history. After the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent, mainly Californians, were rounded up and forcibly interned in concentration camps until the end of the World War II. Lange’s haunting photographs document this episode and this community.
Incredible to realise that while Lange trekked dry plains and dusty prairies she was lugging around her trademark heavy wooden camera, glass plates and tripod, cumbersome technology which to the modern viewer would seem closer to Fox Talbot than photoshop.
Sadly, Lange’s stirring black and white images are as relevant today as they were when they first stunned the American public during the Great Depression. They are also a timely reminder of photography’s unique power to move us as nothing else can. I urge you to see this astonishing show.
Dorothea Lange, Family walking on highway – five children – Oklahoma, June 1938. Library of Congress.
Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing runs until 2 September 2018 at the Barbican Art Gallery, tickets £13.50, members and children under 14 free. Your ticket gives you same day entry to companion photography show, Vanessa Winship: And Time Unfolds. Find out more at barbican.org.uk.
