After the dust settles …
Within 20th-century photography, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is as instantly recognisable as the Mona Lisa. Far less so is what she created after her famous images of farm workers in the Californian dust bowl.
What lies ahead …
With their relaxed, friendly pose, these college students – photographed in 1942 – look deceptively carefree. However, they are headed for indefinite incarceration.
The whole picture …
Lange’s series documenting Japanese-American internment tracks the whole wrenching experience of the US west coast population moved, without any charges or hearings, to concentration camps, following the attack on Pearl Harbor. That the War Relocation Authority employed a photographer at all seems something of a surprise. If they were expecting a propaganda exercise, they got a shock.
Go west …
Throughout, Lange is at pains to emphasise how very American her subjects – two-thirds of whom were born in the US – in fact are.
Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing, Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, to 2 September
