Through more 140 photographs, the exhibition recounts the pivotal ten years of work of one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, the American Dorothea Lange (Hoboken, 1895 – San Francisco, 1965).
In 1935, she and her husband, the economist Paul S. Taylor, began to document the dramatic living conditions of migrant farmworkers coming from a large part of the United States, and particularly from the state of California. Lange carried out this work with other photographers as part of a government documentation program called Farm Security Administration (FSA). This work allowed Lange to experience first-hand and to depict, for her own country and for the rest of the world, the places and faces of a real tragedy of poverty, which is represented by the very famous image of the Migrant Mother.
This work ends with the outbreak of World War II, which the United States joined in 1941 after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The second main group of pictures here exhibited focuses precisely on the American population of Japanese descent. Indeed, after the declaration of war, the U.S. government decided to intern representatives of the Japanese native community in prison camps. Lange objectively documents this little-known and unedifying chapter in American history in a way to show her support to these vanquished people, reduced to poverty and captivity due to the historical events.
The research projects presented in this exhibition were both commissioned by the government, but for very different reasons. If the work for the FSA is disseminated to inform citizens of the plight of their countrymen, the images of the prison camps have no public function, and Lange cannot keep or use the negatives. Due to censorship, these shots remained unknown until the early 2000s. Today, however, they constitute a fundamental testimony for the reconstruction of historical facts that continue to interrogate our present.
