Seeing People

Seeing People – An in-depth look at portraiture, identity and inequality as they appear in Dorothea Lange’s iconic photographs.

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) aimed to make photographs that were, in her own words, “important and useful”. Her decades of research into how photography could express people’s core values and identities have helped to broaden our current understanding of portraiture and the significance of documentary practice.

Lange’s sensitive portraits, which show the common humanity of often marginalized people, played an essential role in public understanding of vast social problems in the 20th century. Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of the indigenous populations of Arizona and New Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, 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 his influential and widely disseminated photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic and racial inequality – themes that remain as relevant to our time as they were to his.