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PUBLISHER
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9 x 10.5 in. / 176 pgs / 70 color / 75 duotone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2020 p. 9   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781633451049 TRADE
List Price: $55.00 CAD $77.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

New York, NY
The Museum of Modern Art, 02/09/20–05/09/20

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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures

Edited with text by Sarah Hermanson Meister. Text by Julie Ault, Kimberly Juanita Brown, River Encalada Bullock, Sam Contis, Jennifer Greenhill, Lauren Kroiz, Sally Mann, Sandra Phillips, Wendy Red Star, Christina Sharpe, Robert Slifkin, Rebecca Solnit, Tess Taylor.

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures

On the unique synthesis of word and image in Dorothea Lange's boldly political photography, which defined the iconography of WPA and Depression-era America

Toward the end of her life, Dorothea Lange reflected, “All photographs—not only those that are so-called ‘documentary’... can be fortified by words.” Though Lange's career is widely heralded, this connection between words and pictures has received scant attention. A committed social observer, Lange paid sharp attention to the human condition, conveying stories of everyday life through her photographs and the voices they drew in. Published in conjunction with the first major MoMA exhibition of Lange’s in 50 years, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures brings fresh attention to iconic works from the collection together with lesser-known photographs—from early street photography to projects on the criminal justice system. The work’s complex relationships to words show Lange’s interest in art’s power to deliver public awareness and to connect to intimate narratives in the world.

Presenting Lange’s work in its diverse contexts—photobooks, Depression-era government reports, newspapers, magazines, poems—along with the voices of contemporary artists, writers and thinkers, the book offers a nuanced understanding of Lange’s career, and new means for considering words and pictures today. An introductory essay by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister is followed by sections organized according to “words” from a range of historical contexts: Lange’s landmark photobook An American Exodus, Life and Aperture magazines, an illustrated guide to minimize racism in jury trials, and many more. These contexts are punctuated with original contributions from a distinguished group of contemporary writers, artists and critical thinkers, including Julie Ault, Kimberly Juanita Brown, River Encalada Bullock, Sam Contis, Jennifer Greenhill, Lauren Kroiz, Sally Mann, Sandra Phillips, Wendy Red Star, Christina Sharpe, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Slifkin and Tess Taylor.

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) operated a successful San Francisco portrait studio in the 1920s before going on to work with the Resettlement Administration (and later the Farm Security Administration) documenting the hardships of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl migration. During World War II, Lange worked for the US government photographing the Japanese American internment camps, and California’s wartime economy. Lange’s photographs were published widely during her lifetime. Lange worked closely with curator John Szarkowski on a retrospective that opened posthumously in 1966 at the Museum of Modern Art.


Featured image is reproduced from 'Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

New York Times

Alice Gregory

[Lange's] legacy combines two fields — art and journalism — whose entirely separate constraints and ethics can still, at their best, change the world.

New York Times

Arthur Lubow

With or without the support of words, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), created some of the greatest images of the unsung struggles and overlooked realities of American life.

Photograph

Vince Aletti

[Lange] saw clearly and concisely, without sentiment or polemics, but her pictures never feel detached or merely repertorial.

Financial Times

Ariella Budick

A bracing tribute to an astonishing artist, a woman who survived childhood polio (though not unscathed) and hauled herself and her camera across the US in its most crushing years. [...] She understood how to tune her vision to human beauty.

Interview

Jadie Stillwell

While Lange’s images have always spoken to us, her subjects weren’t always able to speak for themselves. Words were perhaps important to Lange because they weren’t always implicit; rather, they were hard-earned.

Galerie

Charles Caesar

Dorothea Lange’s boldly political photography defined the iconography of WPA and Depression-era America.

Aperture

Brian Wallis

In considering the words that provide the politicized context for Lange’s work, Meister focuses primarily on what some have called the “afterlife of photographs”—that is, not the decisive moment of capture, but rather the subsequent uses of images, how they circulate and accrue new meanings, often well beyond the photographer’s original intentions.

Hyperallergic

Ela Bittencourt

In Lange’s photography, human ingenuity and grace triumph over the unspeakable blows of the Great Depression and other social oppression, even when hope is in short supply.

New Yorker

Peter Schjeldahl

Lange was a poet of the ordinary but imperious human need, under any conditions, for mutual contact.

New York Review of Books

Valeria Luiselli

After documenting nearly a half-century of crises and the lives of those most deeply affected by them, Lange understood, possibly too well, the enormous responsibility that comes with telling any story, but especially the story of other people’s struggles. Fear is an embodied knowledge, an almost physical intuition of possible outcomes learned through past experience. It can spin into paranoia, paralyze us, shock us into impassivity. But it can also be a powerful drive, as I suppose it was for Lange, who with all her “darkroom terrors” was still able to document what many others had not yet seen or wanted to see.

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures

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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/2/2020

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures is on Virtual View at MoMA

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures opens today at MoMA

"I am trying here to say something about the despised, the defeated, the alienated," Dorothea Lange said in 1966. "About death and disaster. About the wounded, the crippled, the helpless, the rootless, the dislocated. About duress and trouble. About finality. About the last ditch." Her 1955–57 photograph, The Defendant, Alameda County Courthouse, California is reproduced from Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, published to accompany the exhibition on Virtual View at MoMA while we "museum from home." The first major MoMA show of the photographer's work in half a century, Words & Pictures presents Lange's most iconic works for the FSA and the United States government alongside early street photography and lesser-known works like this one, exposing the biases and flaws of the American criminal justice system. Crucially, both the exhibition and this beautifully produced volume emphasize Lange's embrace of written language to enhance and explain her often socially complex photographs. continue to blog


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