Dorothea Lange's American Country Woman series and the NYPL Picture Collection

 


Dorothea Lange's American Country Woman series and the NYPL Picture Collection

 In 1964, while working on her retrospective exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Dorothea Lange contacted Javitz about placing what became three sets of photographs of her work in the Picture Collection files: A portfolio of what Lange called The American Country Woman; another a series on the Amana Society of Iowa, made while on a 1941 Guggenheim grant; and a third group a selection of over 200 exhibition prints and working proofs presented as a gift. 

 Lange understood the mission of the Picture Collection and wanted her legacy of photo-documentation to be a permanent part of it. Lange wrote to Javitz in 1965 about the American Country Woman series: 

“There are about sixteen personages in the box and in many cases as accompaniment to the Women is a photograph of where she lives, her habitation. I have worked on these photographs for years, on and off, and they are captioned and in some cases documented. There is some historical importance to this collection. The photographs are not pictury, but forthright.”

 TMS, Lange to Javitz, 2 pp. New York Public Library Archives, RG8, Picture Collection records, Correspondence Box 1.

 The portfolios she eventually submitted act perhaps as a counterpoint to her 1964 MoMA retrospective. They sum up the shared vision that Javitz and Lange had for the role of photography in documenting America and its role in disseminating that vision to the public at-large."

 It is a true measure of their friendship. 

For the full portfolio see: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/photographs-from-the-american-country-woman-series

 Excerpt from Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library's Picture Collection, Appendix I, page 234.

Above: Plate 11: Ex-slave with a long memory. Alabama. 1938. Neg. No. 38164. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. 

Words on Pictures: Romana and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection. edited by Anthony T. Troncale. New York: Photo | Verso Publications, LLC, 2020.   ISBN 978-1-7346409-0-8 (hardcover)  Identifiers ISBN  978-1-7346409-1-5 (ebook)



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