Author Description

"Dorothea Lange's photograph, Migrant Mother, is one of the most indelible and recognizable 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, charting the legacy of her exceptional photographic oeuvre." "Dorothea Lange was one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century. A pioneering social documentarian, she was a prominent advocate of the power of photography to effect change, using her camera as a political tool to explose what she saw as society's cruel injustices and inequalities. Featuring over two hundred images, this publication brings together the most signficant bodies of work she created throughout her life, from early portraiture and social realist work made during the Great Depression in the 1930s, to photographs of the internment of Japanese American citizens during the Second World War and the changing physical and social landscape of her beloved West Coast in the 1940s and '50s. With newly commissioned essays by David Campany, Drew Heath Johnson and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, as well as an extensive illustrated chronology and rare archival material, much of which is reproduced for the first time, this book provides a comprehensive overview of Lange's life and work."