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, Washington Exhibition Schedule:   National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (November 5, 2023–March 31, 2024)  

"War is over; the heroic French population reaffirms superiority. Love, Paris, and Flowers but London was black, white, and gray, the elegance, the style, all present in front of always changing fog. Then I met a man from Wales talking about the Miners and I had read How Green Was My Valley. This became my only try to make a 'Story'." --Robert Frank This magnificent new edition of London/Wales, which features never-before-seen photographs, juxtaposes Frank's images of the elegant world of London money with the grimy working-class world of postwar Wales--bankers opposite coal miners. It brings together two distinct bodies of work, and reveals a significant documentary precedent for The Americans. In also offers an important view of Frank's development, demonstrating an early interest in social commentary, in the narrative potential of photographic sequencing, and innovative use of the expressionistic qualities of the medium.