Oakland Museum of California
Dorothea Lange documented American life through nuanced photographs that highlighted the major social issues of the 20th century. Next week, you can virtually scroll through hundreds of her works, courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California’s latest digital exhibit devoted to the world-renowned photographer.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Lange was best known for her Depression-era work and her visceral documentation of the Jim Crow South, capturing the hardships of everyday life during some of America’s darkest times. (Lange’s monochromes of farmers reeling from the Dust Bowl are now synonyms when imagining the destitution born from the 1930s ecological and agricultural cataclysm.) Though a New Jerseyan by birth, Lange eventually set up roots in the Bay Area, where she would later die in San Francisco of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965.
So it makes that much more sense why Lange’s personal archive was gifted to the Oakland Museum (OMCA) shortly after her passing — with OMCA now soon debuting a new exhibit dedicated to selections of her photographs and personal quotes that harp on today’s political and social struggles.
The Dorothea Lange Digital Archive curates and interprets a selection of Lange’s work for the first time in a digital format; OMCA’s lauded 2017 exhibition Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing and the 2020 opening of Dorothea Lange: Photography as Activism each received accolades from across the world and helped cement the Oakland museum as the omega in curating Lange’s works for public display.
Read the full article here.
