ISBN: HB: 9780300272000
October 2023
208 pp.
26,6x23,4 cm
60 tritone, 40 black&white illus.
HB:
40.00 GBP
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Dorothea Lange
Seeing People
An expansive look at portraiture, identity, and inequality as seen in Dorothea Lange's iconic photographs.
Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) aimed to make pictures that were, in her words, "important and useful". Her decades-long investigation of how photography could articulate people's core values and sense of self helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice.
Lange's sensitive portraits showing the common humanity of often marginalized people were pivotal to public understanding of vast social problems in the twentieth century. 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, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Drawing on new research, the authors look at 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.
Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) aimed to make pictures that were, in her words, "important and useful". Her decades-long investigation of how photography could articulate people's core values and sense of self helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice.
Lange's sensitive portraits showing the common humanity of often marginalized people were pivotal to public understanding of vast social problems in the twentieth century. 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, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Drawing on new research, the authors look at 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.
About the author
Philip Brookman is consulting curator, Sarah Greenough is senior curator and head of the department of photographs, and Andrea Nelson is associate curator, all at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Laura Wexler is the Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.