To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, potentially unattainable…
This is a major retrospective of one of the best known documentary photographers of the 20th century, the American Dorothea Lange. It brings together 300 objects, from hundreds of vintage prints and original book publications through to ephemera, field notes, letters. It also includes a documentary film interview with her made towards the end of her life.
Rarely has an artist or photographer been so overshadowed by one work, Lange’s super-famous portrait of a Migrant Mother which has come to symbolise the suffering of America’s Mid-western farmers, forced to abandon their land due to bank foreclosures and catastrophic environmental collapse.
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
But the exhibition goes out of its way to present this period of Lange’s work in the broader, and more varied context of her…
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