Photographers: DOROTHEA LANGE: Life Work

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum

Feb. 21 – May 3, 2026

This exhibit offers a comprehensive career retrospective of original lifetime prints by the legendary documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. Highlights include oversized exhibition prints of her seminal portraits from the Great Depression, such as White Angel Breadline, Migratory Farm Worker and, most famously, Migrant Mother – an emblematic picture that came to personify pride and resilience in the face of abject poverty in 1930s America.

Lange herself knew adversity early in life. At age 7, she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifetime limp. And at age 12, her father disappeared, leaving an impoverished household behind. Every day she would ride the ferry with her mother from Hoboken to Lower Manhattan to a roiling working-class neighborhood teeming with immigrants. During that period, Lange talked her way into photo courses with a range of teachers as diverse as Arnold Genthe and Clarence White.

In 1918 she moved to San Francisco, where she befriended the photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and through them, the celebrated Western painter Maynard Dixon, who became her first husband.

She soon opened a thriving portrait studio that catered to San Francisco’s professional class and monied elite. But with the crash of 1929, she found her true calling, as a peripatetic chronicler of the many faces of America, old and young, urban and rural, native-born and immigrant, as they dealt with unprecedented hardship, sometimes with resilience, often with despondence.

Her immortal portraits seared these faces of the Depression era into America’s consciousness.Featuring 50 remarkable photographs, this exhibition traces Lange’s dynamic life and career, including many of her renowned images of the Great Depression. Best known for her powerful images of displaced families and migrant workers, Lange captured the human toll of economic hardship with sensitivity and empathy. Her photographs have become icons of American cultural history, documenting the suffering of the Great Depression and the striking landscapes of the 1930s Dust Bowl era.

In addition to her renowned Depression-era work, the exhibition highlights lesser-known aspects of Lange’s career, including images of her family life, artistic collaborations with photographers such as Ansel Adams, and projects undertaken during her travels throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s.

Lange began her photography career in San Francisco, operating a successful portrait studio from 1919 until the mid-1930s. In 1933, she first documented the breadlines and the hardship visible in the streets. The circulation of Lange’s street photographs led to her employment with the Resettlement Administration and then the Farm Security Administration (FSA), documenting the struggles of farm workers in rural America. Lange’s compelling work raised public awareness of the dire need for federal assistance, garnering support for congressional funding of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.

All works in the exhibition are drawn from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. The exhibition has been organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936

Photographers

Monday, February 23, 2026

DOROTHEA LANGE: Life Work

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