Curator talks about the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange
On Thursday, Aug. 12, from 7 to 8 p.m., the Grace Hudson Museum presents a virtual illustrated talk by Drew Johnson, Curator at the Oakland Museum of California, on the life and art of Dorothea Lange. The Oakland Museum has a large collection of Lange imagery as well as her archives, which can be accessed at Dorothea Lange Digital Archive. A link to the talk is at https:// global.gotomeeting.com/ join/635011805, or you can easily find it on the Grace Hudson Museum’s website.
Dorothea Lange (18951965) was a leading figure in the emergent field of photojournalism, the art of documenting the news of the day using still photos. Employed by the Farm Security Administration, one of the New Deal agencies formed by Franklin Roosevelt, Lange began documenting the displacement and suffering of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Her photos of farmworkers and Dust Bowl refugees — many of them abandoning their farms in the South and Southwest and heading to California — placed a human face on the millions displaced and impoverished by ecological and economic catastrophe.
In 1941, Lange gave up a Guggenheim Fellowship she had been awarded to document the forced relocation of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, photographing their boardedup homes and businesses, families waiting for transport, and life in internment camps such as Manzanar. A survivor of polio, Lange walked with an altered gait, which, she said, “formed me, guided me, instructed me, and humiliated me.”
Lange’s 1935 photographs of fieldworkers in Southern California’s Coachella Valley puts her in close proximity to the desert town of Mecca, and to its postmaster, Susie Keef Smith.
Smith and her cousin Lula Mae Graves were both active as photographers of the desert during this period, with their work on display currently (and in person) at the Grace Hudson Museum in an exhibit titled “Postcards from Mecca.” The exhibit, which documents the women’s lives and adventures in the Coachella Valley and other parts of the vast Southern California desert, is on display until Aug. 22.
The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah. For more information, visit the website at www.gracehudsonmuseum. org or call (707) 467-2836.