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 ar...