Seeing People

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) aimed to make photographs that were, in her own words, “important and useful”. Lange’s sensitive portraits, which show the common humanity of people who are often marginalised, played a key role in public understanding of broad social issues in the twentieth century.

Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of the indigenous peoples of Arizona and New Mexico, as well as her depictions of striking workers, migrant farmers, rural African Americans, Japanese Americans in internment camps and the people she met on her travels in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Drawing on new research, the authors examine Lange’s origins in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely disseminated photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic and racial inequalities.