Exhibition of the week Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing

Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2 (020-7638 4141, www.barbican.org.uk). Until 2 September

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was a pioneering documentary photographer who captured the hardship of the Great Depression like no other, said Lucy Scovell on The Culture Whisper. Indeed, her 1936 photograph Migrant Mother is probably the most famous image of the era: taken on a pea pickers’ farm in California, it pictured a destitute but “defiant” woman sitting in a makeshift shelter, gazing into the distance as her “cowering” children huddled around her. As soon as it was published, this “harrowing yet poignant portrait” alerted America to “the devastating plight” of the Dust Bowl refugees, and became a timeless symbol of dignity “in the face of adversity”. However, the rest of Lange’s “formidable” output has been too often forgotten – a state of affairs that this much “much-anticipated” exhibition sets out to correct. The show is the first UK retrospective of Lange’s work, bringing together hundreds of photographs to demonstrate how she documented life on the margins of mid-20th century America. This “long-overdue” show is a “triumphant success”.

Lange “was happiest as an artist when tragedy was close at hand”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. She began her career taking society portraits in wealthy San Francisco, but the 1929 stock market crash compelled her to address the mass poverty she saw all around her: as she later put it, she “woke up”. Her pictures of the mid-1930s have a quality that can only be achieved by getting extremely close to one’s subject: we see a “scarily intense” street urchin, or a “wild-eyed man” astride his broken-down car, or a Dust Bowl refugee returning home, lamenting his futile mission to find work. These are “truly electrifying” photographs in which “you can positively smell the catastrophe”. Lange continued to document hardship and injustice, yet while her later work is undoubtedly impressive, it lacks the same sense of “complete engagement” with its subject.

Received wisdom has it that Lange “lost her way” with the coming of the Second World War, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Yet if this show proves anything, it is that she was consistent right up until old age. Her pictures of wartime internment camps for Japanese-americans, for example, are “riveting”, as is a 1956 series on a small town condemned for demolition to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Elsewhere, there are images of impoverished black sharecroppers and Mexican labourers, and an entire gallery devoted to Migrant Mother and its creation. What a “tremendous” exhibition this is.