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DOROTHEA LANGE (American, 1895-1965) DAMAGED CHILD, SHACKTOWN, ELM GROVE, OKLAHOMA (the damage is...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:60,000.00 - 90,000.00 USD
DOROTHEA LANGE (American, 1895-1965) DAMAGED CHILD, SHACKTOWN, ELM GROVE, OKLAHOMA (the damage is...
DOROTHEA LANGE
(American, 1895-1965)
DAMAGED CHILD, SHACKTOWN,
ELM GROVE, OKLAHOMA
(the damage is done)
signed “Dorothea Lange, 1163 Euclid Avenue, Berkeley, California” and handwritten “The Damage is Done” in blue ink by the artist on verso of mount
cropping notations in
pencil on verso of mount
gelatin silver print mounted on board
93?8 x 71?2 in. (23.8 x 19.1 cm)
mount: 99?16 x 73?4 in. (24.3 x 19.7 cm)
1936
ESTIMATE: $60,000-90,000
PROVENANCE
Thomas Walther, BERLIN
LITERATURE
Edward Steichen, ed., THE FAMILY OF MAN, NEW YORK, The Museum of Modern Art, 1955, p. 49 (illustrated)
DOROTHEA LANGE, NEW YORK, The Museum of Modern Art, 1966, p. 27
(illustrated)
Nathan Lyons, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, NEW YORK, Horizon Press, 1967, pl. 29 (illustrated)
Robert Coles and Therese Heyman, DOROTHEA LANGE, PHOTOGRAPHS OF A LIFETIME, NEW YORK, Aperture, 1982, p. 81 (illustrated)
Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips and John Szarkowski, DOROTHEA LANGE: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS, SAN FRANCISCO, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exh. cat., Chronicle Books, 1994, pl. 85 (illustrated)
Pierre Borhan, DOROTHEA LANGE: THE HEART AND MIND OF A PHOTOGRAPHER, boston, Little, Brown and Company, 2002, p. 223 (illustrated)
EXHIBITED
SAN FRANCISCO, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, DOROTHEA LANGE: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS, May 19-September 4, 1994
SAN FRANCISCO, Fraenkel Gallery, ABOUT FACES, September 7-October 28, 2000
In the beginning of her career, Dorothea Lange worked as a portraitist. Between 1919 and 1934, her subjects tended to hail from the upper classes and included successful industrialists and businessmen. During this time she produced many soft-focus portraits that sold well and helped sustain her family. While many of the portraits from this era are quite beautiful, they served mainly as an introduction to what would become the most respected work of Lange’s career: photographs of Americans affected by the Great Depression.
This portrait belongs to a group of photographs Lange shot in the South during the mid-1930s. While visiting Oklahoma, Lange witnessed severely poor farming conditions resulting from over-cultivation of the land in the late nineteenth century, as well as vast unemployment caused by the displacement of human labor from the influx of tractors and other machinery. Lange’s passion for documenting the lives of people who suffered under these conditions led to her photographs being published in various newspapers. She continued this work for the Farm Security Administration on and off through 1940. Here we see an Oklahoma child living in a state of poverty as a victim of social and political forces well beyond her family’s realm of influence. Lange described this girl as possibly retarded, as well as “abused and made an outcast because she was different” (Phillips, AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS, p. 25). Beyond the general sympathy Lange possessed for her subjects, she may have felt a deeper personal connection to this particular girl: at the age of seven, Lange herself had contracted polio, which caused her foot to become limp. Here, perhaps even more than in her many other astonishing photographs of the Great Depression, Lange’s remarkable talent is her ability to create photojournalistic images which “show an empathy so deep that it raises them to the level of art” (Heyman, AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS, p. 25).