Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing

Fascinating exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery looking at the life and work of the photographer Dorothea Lange.

 
Lange is best known for her iconic US Depression era photograph “Migrant Mother” and there was a section of the show devoted to the picture and how it had been used over the years. I was particularly interested in how in later prints Lange had edited out the mothers’ thumb so you can date a print as pre and post thumb. It is a moving image and it was lovely to see the other pictures that were taken in the same session.
 
The show did say however that that image had overshadowed the rest of Lange’s career. She wasn’t one image but was one of the founders of documentary photography. She opened a studio in San Francisco in 1919 specialising in rather wistful portraits but after the Stock Market crash San Francisco filled with migrants and she started going onto the street to photograph them. This led to her working on reports with the social scientist Paul Schuster Taylor who she married in 1935 and they travelled the country recording the effect of the depression on the population.
 
There was a lovely video of Lange in later life talking about her career. Post World War 2 she seems to have struggled to find a subject, almost like she found it hard to photograph the good times. She turned to following the destruction of the town of Monticello to build a damn and produced a touching series of a community saying goodbye to their town and moving out.  
 
My favourite image was “White Angel Bread Line” from 1933 and showed one mad turning away from the crown in a bread queue. I felt it represented the individual within a mass movement. I also loved one of a young woman on a bus which just showed her legs in heavily darned stockings and lovely T-bar shoes.
 
Closed on 2 September 2018
 
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