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Migrant agricultural worker's family, Nipomo California. Photo by Dorothea Lange. February 1936. Courtesy Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

On Tour: Capturing the Home Front

CURRENTLY TOURING

Featuring photographs by Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake and Australian wartime photographers.

Life at home in a world at war. 

Famous American photographer Dorothea Lange established her reputation as a documentarian when she was commissioned by the government to travel the United States in the 1930s to capture and reveal the devastation wrought on Americans by The Great Depression.

During WWII Lange was commissioned by the US Office of War Information to photograph America’s factories, shipyards and farms as the nation went to war.

Her unvarnished depictions of the forced internment of Japanese Americans from coastal California to inland camps in 1942 were considered too realistic and raw for public consumption and Ansel Adams was commissioned to document the desolate camp at Manzanar in a better light.

 

 

 

“My own approach is based upon three considerations: First – hands off! Whenever I photograph I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second – a sense of place. 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.”

- Dorothea Lange

The exhibition includes reproductions of Depression and WWII photographs by Lange complemented by reproductions from Australian collections of the evocative work of Sam Hood, William Cranstone, Jim Fitzpatrick and Hedley Cullen who documented wartime industry, Japanese internment, family and country life on our side of the Pacific.


A War and Peace in the Pacific 75  exhibition supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund

Featured image: Migrant agricultural worker's family, Nipomo California. Photo by Dorothea Lange. February 1936. Courtesy Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress..

About the Artist

Dorothea Lange at work in the 1930s. Reproduced courtesy Library Of Congress 8b27245a.

Dorothea Lange at work in the 1930s. Reproduced courtesy Library Of Congress 8b27245a.

Dorothea Lange  1895 – 1965

“My own approach is based upon three considerations: First – hands off! Whenever I photograph I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second – a sense of place. 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.” - Dorothea Lange

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Lange studied photography at Columbia University then went on to a successful career as a portrait photographer in San Francisco.

As an early practitioner of documentary photography she used her large Graflex camera to record the dignity and desperation of Americans made destitute by the Great Depression. During WWII she turned her camera to the war effort on American streets, farms and shipyards and on the forced internment of Japanese Americans. 

Using available light and aiming for a candid record she would make herself and her camera known to her subject and gauge their reaction before going ahead or walking away. It’s the fleeting intimacy of these unplanned encounters that still engages us today.

Lange died of oesophageal cancer in October 1965 while planning the first retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
 

Shop the Homefront Store

Featuring photographs by Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake and Australian wartime photographers. Learn more about the photographers through our range of products relating to the new exhibition Capturing the Home Front.

Shop the full range here

 

DVD - Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lighting

$39.95

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Tote Bag - Dorothea Lange on car

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Displaced - Manzanar 1942-1945

$85

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