Dorothea Lange (55s) - Hardcover

Durden, Mark

4.29

104 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714846198 ISBN 13: 9780714846194

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2011

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Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was a highly acclaimed social realist photographer who recorded one of the most important historical periods in American social history. In 1935, tired of studio portraiture, she began working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and created many of the images that define the Depression and the disastrous migration of farming families to the West in the popular imagination. This monograph is a concise introduction to her work, with an essay, 55 photographs and picture-by-picture commentaries.

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Review:

'Lange's work defines an era of destitution and drought, and still resonates even now. This is the perfect introduction to one of the world's greatest photojournalists.
Practical Photography

'Lange was the first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim Photography Fellowship and this book showcases her most famous work, an arresting 55-picture, chronologically ordered documentation of the lives of migrant workers during the Great Depression.'
The Independent

Synopsis:

It was during the depth of the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 30s, when at least 14 million people were out of work in the USA, that Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) first ventured out on the streets with her camera. In 1935 a report on migrant workers, illustrated with Lange's photographs, came to the attention of Roy Stryker and in response he invited Lange to become a member of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic unit. Like Stryker, Lange believed that photography was a tool of political action, and this was no more apparent then when the federal government responded to the starvation crisis shortly after the San Francisco News received Lange's photographs - it quickly supplied 20,000 pounds of food to feed hungry migrants at the camps. Lange's championing of black migrants can be seen in the photograph "Plantation Overseer"and his Field Hands" of 1936, in which Lange captured the image of a man who exemplified the racist, exploitative and un-democratic attitudes that were rife in Southern plantation life. The evidence of racism revealed in this photograph - and others - is countered by Lange's many dignifying portraits of black subjects.

When the bitter years of the Depression were overtaken by the advent of World War II, she continued to demonstrate her opposition to the poor treatment of migrants by opposing the relocation of 110,000 American Japanese to internment camps. She recorded the evacuation in Northern California after being assigned by the War Relocation Authority. In 1955, after a bout of ill health, Lange continued to work on contemporary social issues, namely a photo-essay for "Life" magazine, a sensitive study of the work of a Yugoslav-American public defender, representing those who could not afford to pay their own legal expenses. Lange watched and photographed him on and off for a year, catching the reflective moments of his defendants' body language. Lange was the first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1941) and was placed on the Honour Roll of the American Society of Magazine Photographers in 1963. She was honoured with major solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1960) and the Oakland Art Museum (1960) and she began preparing a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York shortly before she died in 1965.

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