Words and Pictures

The museum exhibition I visited was Dorothea Lange’s Words and Pictures show at the Museum of Modern Art. Lange was a documentary photographer and journalist who photographed from the 1930s to the 1960s. She worked for the FSA (Farm Security Administration) during the Great Depression in America to document the conditions of the poor. Throughout Lange’s life, she worked on many documentary series, which were highlighted on the second floor of the MoMA. When walking into the space, you notice that each wall has a set of photographs that are paired with a bolded title along with an excerpt of the work displayed in that section.

The exhibition space was dimly lit with warm lighting and went in a zagging formation of having four walls and a decent size opening leading into the next space. It was a big space of three large areas to display work, which was good for fitting the twelve different series of Lange’s work.

The exhibition starts with walking into a small entrance space that has Lange’s earliest work from the 1930s when she photographed San Francisco during the great depression. From that space, you then enter into a bigger area that has four walls filled with photographs and an entryway leading into another area. In the center of this space are a table and four chairs that have books of Dorothea Lange’s work. Going around each wall, there are small framed photographs and a few books in display boxes mounted to the wall.

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On the wall closest to the entrance, which shows her government work, there is a touch screen of more photographs that Lange took while photographing for the government. Going into the next space, which is smaller in size than the first area, you are greeted by a bench and a projection on that wall that shows a video of Dorothea Lange talking about her work. There are four more series of works on each of the walls in this section. The largest wall in that area has photographs and a display table with magazines opened to pages that show Lange’s photo essay work. There’s an opening in the middle of the wall that leads into an area that is just as big as the first space. In the center of this area, there are two tables with books of Dorothea Lange’s work along with a few chairs around each table. All the walls are covered in similarly sized photographs, except for two larger-sized prints of bare trees on the wall of her later life work. Those two prints are the biggest throughout the whole exhibition. There is also a wall in this section that is dedicated to her most famous photograph called The Migrant Mother. That wall has the famous photograph, news articles, and magazines that talk about the photograph, displayed on the wall.

Analysis: The way Dorothea Lange’s Words and Pictures exhibition was set up allowed for viewers to easily navigate around the three spaces. The works were separated by titles and excerpts which made it straightforward to understand what series you are looking at. Each wall had its group of photos and if a series of works had to share a wall, they were displayed differently and were separated by space and the text explaining that series. Also, the works were put up in order of oldest work, going to the work she did later in life. This choice allows you to see Lange’s work in a way that gives an understanding of how her photography career was. The projected video on one of the walls added a sense of connection to the photographer since it was displaying the photographer talking about her work.

Evaluation: The goal of showing Dorothea Lange’s lifelong work cohesively was done successfully. The space was big enough to show a decent amount of Lange’s work, but since she has so many photographs that she’s taken in her lifetime, it was a little overwhelming. I did notice that the work was a bit on the smaller size so they would fit as many photographs as they could, which made you have to go in close to the photographs to see the detail. This made looking at certain photographs a little difficult since many people were around looking at the exhibition, having to get close to the photographs as well. But there were two tables with Dorothea Lange’s books on them that you could freely flip through. The books were filled with mostly all the photographs that were displayed, but it allowed you to look at them closer and not be rushed. The photographs were a bit on the Due to this projection, the lights in the exhibition had to be a bit dim. This didn’t work that well for the space since the photographs were on the smaller side, so viewers had to get close to the photographs to see the detail.