Sarah Greenough – författare

An expansive look at portraiture, identity, and inequality as seen in Dorothea Lange’s iconic photographs  Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) aimed to make pictures that were, in her words, “important and useful.” Her decades-long investigation of how photography could articulate people’s core values and sense of self helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice.  Lange’s sensitive portraits showing the common humanity of often marginalized people were pivotal to public understanding of vast social problems in the twentieth century. Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from 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 while traveling in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.  Drawing on new research, the authors look at Lange’s roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely seen photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic, and racial inequalities—topics that remain as relevant for our times as they were for hers.Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, WashingtonExhibition Schedule:  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC(November 5, 2023–March 31, 2024)

Photography Reinvented brings together thirty-five works by eighteen critically acclaimed artists who, through innovative experimentation and visionary conceptual scope, have changed the course of contemporary photography. From the seemingly objective, straightforward style and large-scale, vibrantly colored prints of famed Dusseldorf School photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff to works by groundbreaking contemporary artists, including Thomas Demand, Vik Muniz, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Catherine Opie, Photography Reinvented traces the aesthetic, technical, and philosophical shifts of the art form during a period of substantial change. Some of the artists, such as Sherman and Demand as well as Muniz and John Baldessari, explore the nature of photography as a medium that appropriates imagery from mass culture and other sources. Others, such as Hofer and Struth, have reassessed iconic works of art and architecture, revealing the relevance of the past in our present lives. And all of these artists have made large-scale prints that create new and strangely destabilizing experiences of space for their viewers.In an age when photography can no longer claim documentary veracity as its raison d'etre, Photography Reinvented examines the medium's redefinition, repurposing, and reimagining. Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington September 30, 2016-January 29, 2017