The Frist Art has launched Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing, an exhibition that examines a broad range of the artist’s work through the lens of social and political activism. The Frist is the only U.S. venue that is presenting this exhibition after its debut in 2017 in California. The exhibition features Lange’s iconic photographs from the Great Depression. It will also include works from her early years as a studio portraitist in San Francisco, along with images of the grim conditions of incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II, naval shipyard workers of different sexes and races contributing to the patriotic cause, and inequity in our judicial system in the 1950s. Organised by the Oakland Museum of California, which houses Lange’s personal archive, the exhibition will be on view in the Frist’s Upper-Level Galleries from 15 March through 27 May 2019.
Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) is recognised as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, and her insightful and compassionate work has exerted a profound influence on the development of modern documentary photography. With hardship and human suffering as a consistent theme throughout her career, Lange created arresting portraits with the aim of sparking reform. Politics of Seeing encompasses approximately 130 vintage and modern photographs and personal memorabilia, including a handwritten letter from the author John Steinbeck. Portions of a documentary produced by one of Lange’s granddaughters will also be on view.
Upon Lange’s death in 1965, her husband, the labour economist Paul Taylor, gave her extensive archive of more than twenty thousand negatives, six thousand prints, and assorted field notes and letters to the Oakland Museum of California, which is located near their longtime home in Berkeley. The exhibition is drawn from that noteworthy collection.
In addition to recording scenes of urban poverty, Lange documented the plight of American refugees who had left the Midwest because of drought and dust storms. The 1936 photograph Migrant Mother, of a mother and three children in a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California, has become an emblem of the hardship endured by many during the American Great Depression. Lange worked for the government’s newly established Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration), and her images were powerful arguments for government assistance. In southern states, Lange saw and made images that exposed racial and economic power relationships that led to exploitative tenant farming practices.
