LANGE JOURNEY

Dorothea Lange's photographs of 1930s migrant workers and sharecroppers, taken for the government's Farm Security Administration, put a face—brave, dignified, hopeful—on poverty. Years later Lange, at the behest of the War Relocation Authority, set out to record another American tragedy, the roundup and internment of Japanese-Americans. Because Lange's photos so clearly revealed the unjust, racist policies of the government, they were Impounded (Norton) until now. Lange's images—such as one of a grandfather whose expression is torn with grief and disbelief as his grandson takes his first steps within the barbed-wired confines of the camp—document a time in our history which we may not want to remember, but which is a part of us nonetheless. As always Lange's work captures the wrong in the world, but also, as we see in the faces of her subjects, the potential for things to be right again.