"Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures," the first major MoMA exhibition of Lange’s in 50 years, brings iconic works from the collection together with less seen photographs—from early street photography to projects on criminal justice reform. 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. The exhibition also uses archival materials such as correspondence, historical publications, and oral histories, as well as contemporary voices, to examine the ways in which words inflect our understanding of Lange’s pictures.
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Toward the end of her life, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) remarked, “All photographs-not only those that are so-called ‘documentary,’ and every photograph really is documentary and belongs in some place, has a place in history-can be fortified by words.” 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. Organized loosely chronologically and spanning her career, the exhibition groups iconic works together with lesser known photographs and traces their varied relationships to words: from early criticism on Lange’s photographs to her photo-essays published in LIFE magazine, and from the landmark photobook An American Exodus to her examination of the US criminal justice system. The exhibition also includes groundbreaking photographs of the 1930s-including Migrant Mother (1936)-that inspired pivotal public awareness of the lives of sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers during the Great Depression.
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These are accompanied by a chorus of first-person quotations from the sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers at the center of her pictures. 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 exhibition offers a more nuanced understanding of Lange’s vocation, and new means for considering words and pictures today. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, edited by Sarah Hermanson Meister. Lange’s photographs, some reproduced in their original published form, are accompanied by contributions from a distinguished group of contemporary writers, artists, and critical thinkers: Julie Ault, Kimberly Juanita Brown, River Encalada Bullock, Sam Contis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, Lauren Kroiz, Sally Mann, Sandra S. Phillips, Wendy Red Star, Christina Sharpe, Robert Slifkin, Rebecca Solnit, and Tess Taylor.
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