PRESS RELEASE
DOROTHEA LANGEPOLITICS OF SEEING10 | 16 | 2018 – 01 | 27 | 2019
JEU DE PAUMECONCORDE
WWW.JEUDEPAUME.ORG#DorotheaLange
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PARTNERS
« Dorothea Lange. Politics of Seeing » is organized by the Oakland Museum of California.The European presentation has been produced in collaboration with Jeu de Paume, Paris and Barbican Art Gallery, London.
The exhibition is supported in part by the Oakland Museum Women’s Board, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Susie Tompkins Buell Fund, and Ann Hatch and Paul Discoe.
The NEUFLIZE OBC BANK, historic sponsor of the Jeu de Paume, and FIDAL chose to bring their supportto the exhibition « Dorothea Lange. Politics of Seeing » in Paris.
This exhibition is made possible through a contribution from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The Jeu de Paume receives public funding from the ministère de la Culture
and its main corporate sponsors are the NEUFLIZE OBC BANKand MANUFACTURE JAEGER-LECOULTRE.
À NOUS PARIS, ELLE, France 5, Le Monde, Le Point, Slate
Cover Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, Nipomo, 1936. The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.
SUMMARY
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EXHIBITION
PRESS RELEASE
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EXHIBITION CATALOGUEINFORMATIONS PRA-TIQUES
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MEDIA PARTNERS
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HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EXHIBITION
This is the first exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s work in France in twenty years. It is a travelling show that originated at the Oakland Museum of California and has been adapted for the Jeu de Paume.
Lange was one of few women photographers to become well known at the time. It should also be noted that Lange was the first woman photographer to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Visitors to this exhibition will be able to discover the strength of her vision and her social engagement with the world she was living in. She used the camera as a tool, combining images with the written word, a vital element in her documentary approach that is introduced in this show as a major part of her practice.
The exhibition is an analysis of her work in the context of its time. It reveals the complexity of the period and the history of the United States of America, bringing to the fore important aspects of American society that have founded its identity. In this respect, Lange’s work is exemplary.
Several series of works are being shown for the first time in France. In particular, vintage prints and a screening of digitized negatives show a full range of photographs of the Japanese-Americans internment camps (1942–1943) with their full captions.
The exhibition will include a map showing the places Lange visited and the journeys she made during the four-to-five year period when she was working for the Farm Security Administration, part of Roosevelt’s political and economic programme called the New Deal. Visitors will be able to understand the development of her work during this period and also the considerable ground she covered when responding to the demands of the commission.
Lange herself considered her work for the FSA to be an integral part of her whole oeuvre even though it was a response to criteria that were sometimes imposed on the photographers. The heart of this exhibition is devoted to this extraordinary body of work emphasising the humanist character of Lange’s approach.
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Dorothea Lange White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor
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The Politics of Seeing features major works by the world famous American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895, Hoboken, New Jersey–1966, San Francisco, California), some of which have never before been exhibited in France. The exhibition focuses on the extraordinary emotional power of Dorothea Lange’s work and on the context of her documentary practice. It features five specific series: the Depression period (1933-1934), a selection of works from the Farm Security Administration (1935-1939), the Japanese American internment (1942), the Richmond shipyards (1942-1944) and a series on a Public defender (1955-1957). Over one hundred splendid vintage prints taken between 1933 and 1957 are enhanced by the presence of documents and screenings broadening the scope of an oeuvre often familiar to the public through images such as White Angel Breadline (1933) and Migrant Mother (1936), which are icons of photographic history. The majority of prints in this exhibition belong to the Oakland Museum of California, where Lange’s considerable archive, donated to the museum after her death by her husband Paul Shuster Taylor, is conserved.
Like John Steinbeck’s famous novel The Grapes of Wrath, Dorothea Lange’s oeuvre has helped shape our conception of the interwar years in America and contributed to our knowledge of this period. However, this exhibition also introduces other aspects of Dorothea Lange’s practice, which she herself considered archival. By placing the photographic work in the context of her anthropological approach, it enables viewers to appreciate how its power also lies in her capacity to interact with her subjects, evident in her captions to the images. She thereby considerably enriched the informative quality of the visual archive and produced a form of oral history for future generations.
In 1932, during the Great Depression that began in 1929, Lange observed the unemployed homeless people in the streets of San Francisco and decided to drop her studio portrait work because she felt that it was no longer adequate. During a two-year period that marked a turning point in her life, she took photographs of urban situations that portrayed the social impact of the recession. This new work became known in artistic circles and attracted the attention of Paul Schuster Taylor, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor was a specialist in agricultural conflicts of the 1930s, and in particular Mexican migrant workers.
He began using Lange’s photographs to illustrate his articles and in 1935 they started working together for the government agencies of the New Deal. Their collaboration lasted for over thirty years.
During the Second World War, Lange continued to practise photography and to document the major issues of the day, including the internment of Japanese-American families during the war; the economic and social development due to industries engaged in the war effort; and the criminal justice system through the work of a county public defence lawyer.
Dorothea Lange’s iconic images of the Great Depression are well known, but her photographs of Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War were only published in 2006. Shown here for the first time in France, they illustrate perfectly how Dorothea Lange created intimate and poignant images throughout her career in order to denounce injustices and change public opinion.
In addition to the prints, a selection of personal items, including contact sheets, field notes and publications allow the public to situate her work within the context of this troubled period.
The exhibition at the Jeu de Paume offers a new perspective on the work of this renowned American artist, whose legacy continues to be felt today. Highlighting the artistic qualities and the strength of the artist’s political convictions, this exhibition encourages the public to rediscover the importance of Dorothea Lange’s work as a landmark in the history of documentary photography.
« Dorothea Lange. Politics of Seeing » is organizedby the Oakland Museum of California.The European presentation has been producedin collaboration with Barbican Art Gallery, Londonand Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Curators: Drew Heath Johnson and Pia Viewing
DOROTHEA LANGEPOLITICS OF SEEING10 | 16 | 2018 – 01 | 27 | 2019
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QUOTES
“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable, but when the great photographs are produced, it will be down that road. I have only touched it, just touched it.”
Interview with Lange, in Dorothea Lange, Part II : The Closer For Me, film produced by KQED for National Educational Television (NET), USA, 1965.
“On the Bowery I knew how to step over drunken men . . . I knew how to keep an expression of face that would draw no attention, so no one would look at me. I have used that my whole life in photographing.”
Ibid., p. 16
“Often it’s just sticking around and being there, remaining there, not swopping in and swopping out in a cloud of dust; sitting down on the ground with people, letting the children look at your camera with their dirty, grimy little hands, and putting their fingers on the lens, and you let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you’re very apt to receive it.”
Anne Whiston, Spirn, Daring to Look, p. 24
“I never steal a photograph. Never. All photographs are made in collaboration, as part of their thinking as well as mine.”
Ibid., p. 23
“My own approach is based upon three considerations. First – hands off! Whatever I photograph I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second – a sense of place. Whatever I photograph, I try to picture as part of its surroundings, as having roots. Third – a sense of time. Whatever I photograph, I try to show as having its position in the past or in the present.”
Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Masters Of Photography, New York Castle Books, 1958, p. 140
“The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.”
“I believe that the camera is a powerful medium for communication and I believe that the camera is a valuable tool for social research which has not been developed to its capacity.”
Dorothea Lange, quoted in Karen Tsujimoto, Dorothea Lange : Archive of an Artist, Oakland, Oakland Museum, 1995, p. 23
“Everything is propaganda for what you believe in, actually, isn’t it? . . . I don’t see that it could be otherwise. The harder and the more deeply you believe in anything, the more in a sense you’re a propagandist. Conviction, propaganda, faith. I don’t know, I never have been able to come to the conclusion that that’s a bad word [...] But at any rate, that’s what the Office of War Information work was.”
Suzanne Riess, « Dorothea Lange: The Making of a documentary Photographer », October 1960-Audust 1961, p. 181
“There is a sharp difference, a gulf. The woman’s position is immeasurably more complicated. There are not very many first-class woman producers, not many. That is, producers of outside things. They produce in other ways. Where they can do both, it’s a conflict. I would like to try. I would like to have one year. I’d like to take one year, almost ask it of myself, ‘Could I have one year?’ Just one, when I would not have to take into account anything but my own inner demands. Maybe everybody would like that . . . but I can’t.”
Ibid., p. 219-220
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1. Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, Nipomo, 1936. The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.
2. Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, Nipomo, 1936. The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor. Imágen de Yágul, 1973/2018, photographie © The Estate of Dorothea Lange Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.
PRESS VISUALSThe royalty-free reproduction and display of the following selection of images is permitted solely as part of the promotion of this exhibition at the Jeu de Paume and only while the exhibition is in progress.
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3. Paul S. Taylor Dorothea Lange in Texas on the Plains, circa 1935. Portrait of Dorothea Lange by Paul S. Taylor © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland
4. Dorothea Lange White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor
5. Dorothea LangeManzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California, 1942 © Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Paul S. Taylor
6. Dorothea LangeShipyard Worker, Richmond California, circa 1943 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor
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7. Dorothea Lange Drought Refugees, circa. 1935 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
8. Dorothea Lange Cars on the Road, 1936. Library of Congress © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
9. Dorothea LangeMigratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
10. Dorothea LangeNear Eutah, Alabama, 1936 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
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11. Dorothea Lange Damaged Child, Shacktown, Elm Grove, Oklahoma, 1936 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
12. Dorothea Lange Ditched, Stalled, and Stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California, 1936 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
13. Dorothea LangeToward Los Angeles, California, 1937 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
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14. Dorothea Lange Unemployed lumber worker goes with his wife to the bean harvest. Note social security number tattooed on his arm. Oregon, 1939 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
15. Dorothea Lange Drought-abandoned house on the edge of the Great Plains near Hollis, Oklahoma, 1938 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
14. Dorothea Lange Unemployed lumber worker goes with his wife to the bean harvest. Note social security number tattooed on his arm. Oregon, 1939 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
15. Dorothea Lange Drought-abandoned house on the edge of the Great Plains near Hollis, Oklahoma, 1938 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
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16. Dorothea Lange Ex-slave with a Long Memory, Alabama, 1938 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
17. Dorothea Lange San Lorenzo, California, 1942. Washday 48 hours before evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry from this farming community in Santa Clar a County, 1942 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
18. Dorothea LangeFamily on the Road, Oklahoma, 1938 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California
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EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
>> DOROTHEA LANGE POLITICS OF SEEING
Librairie du Jeu de Paume / www.librairiejeudepaume.org1, place de la Concorde, Paris 8e
Mardi (nocturne) : 11 h - 21 h – Mercredi à dimanche : 11 h - 19 h / Fermeture le lundi t. 01 47 03 12 36 / [email protected]
Edited by Alona Pardo, with the collaboration of Jilke Golbach
French version Coedition Jeu de Paume / Barbican / Prestel€ 39,95
English version Coedition Jeu de Paume / Barbican / Prestel$ 50 / £37.50
>> Related publications
A Vision Shared : a classic portrait of America and its people, 1935-1943Hank O’NealSteidl2018€ 68
Les photographes de la Farm Security Administration : archives d'une Amérique en crise, 1935-1943 Brannan Beverly W. Seuil 2006 € 96,40
Louons maintenant les grands hommes Walker Evans, James Agee Plon 2017 € 24,90
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