Dorothea Lange (1895–1965)

Quella dell'americana Sam Contis è un'operazione di riscoperta e ricontestualizzazione di alcune immagini (per lo più inedite) di Dorothea Lange, editate con spirito contemporaneo. Contis rilegge la relazione fra quotidiano e politico nell'opera di Lange (queste non sono le "solite" foto della FSA), costruendo connessioni con l'oggi e aggiornando quindi il messaggio dell'autrice. Emerge il tema del "day sleeper", con il sonno come simbolo - nelle parole della curatrice - di tregua e oblio. show more Operazione intelligente (e come prevedibile immagini bellissime, intime e delicate). show less

A Curated Overview
Review of the Aperture Masters of Photography hardcover edition (2014)

Dorothea Lange: Masters... is part of the Aperture Foundation's occasional book series Masters of Photography. Each monograph in the series is an overview of the photography career of a selected photo artist. Aperture itself was founded in 1952 as a non-profit to promote photography and Dorothea Lange herself was one of its founders.

See image at show more target="_top">https://i.pinimg.com/736x/54/10/32/54103294f44ad1bb9e91dd16c1bb8b09--breads-grea...
Photograph: White Angel Breadline, San Francisco 1933 by Dorothea Lange, Image sourced from Pinterest.

This Masters... retrospective provides a selection of 42 photographs from throughout Lange's career. Further to her now iconic 1930s Depression era photographs, such as Migrant Mother, it includes her later photojournalism such as selections from Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (2006), which had previously been confiscated by the U.S. Government. Some brief examples of her early portrait photography and later international journalism bookend the collection.

The text include a career biography and photo-by-photo commentary by Lange specialist Linda Gordon, who also contributed text for Impounded (above) and wrote the preeminent Lange biography Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (2009).

I picked up Dorothea Lange: Aperture Masters of Photography through a recent increased interest in Lange's photojournalism work, due to 2 recent biographic historical fictions on her life in Elise Hooper's Learning to See (2019) and Jasmin Darznik's The Bohemians (2021). show less

Fabulous. I love the work of Dorothea Lange from her early beginnings as a portrait photographer to her final days with her personal photography. Lange became a major force in the beginnings of photojournalism and documentary photography with her work for the RA and the FSA. Her most famous picture is Migrant Mother, which went on to raise over $200,000 for the homeless and migrant worker's in 1936. The picture spawned the start of Life magazine it became first photograph to gain profit from show more the mass media and become a United States postal stamp.

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She truly captured the awful days of the Great Depression of the 1930's in the US.