The magazine of the photo-essay
Jan 2019 back issue
Politics of Seeing
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine.  Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange’s photograph, Migrant Mother, is one of the most indelible and recognisable images of the Dust Bowl era. Lange’s career stretched far beyond the Great Depression, driven throughout by her compassionate advocacy for the people and land of California. This riveting book opens with Lange’s Bay Area portraits of the 1920s and ’30s when her photo studio formed a hub for San Francisco’s bohemian and artistic elite. It offers a generous overview of her work with the Farm Security Administration, where Lange was the only female photographer documenting the impact of the Depression and Dust Bowl on the west coast, working alongside the likes of Walker Evans, as well as her pictures of Japanese Americans forcibly displaced into internment camps following Pearl Harbor. It also includes images from her wartime shipyards series with Ansel Adams, postwar projects on the injustices of the American court system, loss of a community through
the damming of the Putah Creek, and a photo series on Ireland. Accompanying these superbly reproduced images are thoughtful essays by curator Drew Johnson, critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and writer and curator David Campany, which offer appreciations of Lange’s work as an artist and humanitarian.
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, the Oakland Museum of California.
White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933, the Oakland Museum of California.
Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940, the Oakland Museum of California.
Drought Refugees, ca. 1935, the Oakland Museum of California.
Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California, July 3, 1942, the Oakland Museum of California.
Dorothea Lange in Texas on the Plains, ca. 1935, the Oakland Museum of California.
San Francisco, California. Flag of allegiance pledge at Raphael Weill Public School, Geary and Buchanan Streets. Children in families of Japanese
Centerville, California. This evacuee stands by her baggage as she waits for evacuation bus. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be housed in War.
Sacramento, California. College students of Japanese ancestry who have been evacuated from Sacramento to the Assembly Center, 1942.
Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California. An evacuee is shown in the lath house sorting seedlings for transplanting. These plants are year - old seedlings from the Salinas Experiment Station 1942.
Dust Bowl, Grain Elevator, Everett, Texas, June 1938. Library of Congress.
Family walking on highway - five children. Started from Idabel, Oklahoma, bound for Krebs, Oklahoma, June 1938. Library of Congress..
Cars on the Road , August 1936. Library of Congress.
Back to menu Back to menu