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)  

In 1949 Georgia O'Keeffe chose the National Gallery of Art as the custodian of nearly 1,600 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz - the Key Set, as it has become known. With the formation in 1990 of the Gallery's department of photographs under Sarah Greenough, the collection has grown to 14,000 works of art, an assemblage that both charts the development of the medium and reveals the beauty and dynamic versatility of photography over its course of more than 175 years. This elegant book presents some of the most significant and compelling photographs acquired over the years, ranging from experimental photographs made in the earliest years of the medium's history to key works by major twentieth-century figures and contemporary pieces that reset the ways in which photography shapes our experience of the modern world. The guides on this enlightening walk through the history of the medium are members of the extraordinary curatorial team that established the National Gallery's international reputation for photography exhibitions and publications over the past twenty-five years, ever advancing the recognition of photography as a fine art.

The first extensive publication from the extraordinary archive of private correspondence between two of this country's most famous artists There are few couples in the history of 20th-century American art and culture more prominent than Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Between 1915, when they first began to write to each other, and 1946, when Stieglitz died, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged over 5,000 letters (more than 25,000 pages) that describe their daily lives in profoundly rich detail. This long-awaited volume features some 650 letters, carefully selected and annotated by leading photography scholar Sarah Greenough. In O'Keeffe's sparse and vibrant style and Stieglitz's fervent and lyrical manner, the letters describe how they met and fell in love in the 1910s; how they carved out a life together in the 1920s; how their relationship nearly collapsed during the early years of the Depression; and how it was reconstructed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time, the correspondence reveals the creative evolution of their art and ideas; their friendships with many of the most influential figures in early American modernism (Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand, to name a few); and their relationships and conversations with an exceptionally wide range of key figures in American and European art and culture (including Duncan Phillips, Diego Rivera, D. H. Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marcel Duchamp). Furthermore, their often poignant prose reveals insights into the impact of larger cultural forces-World Wars I and II; the booming economy of the 1920s; and the Depression of the 1930s-on two articulate, creative individuals. Published in association with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library