Last West: Roadsongs for dorothea lange
The Museum of Modern Art announces Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, the first major solo exhibition at the Museum of the photographer’s incisive work in over 50 years. On view from February 9 through May 2, 2020, in The Paul J. Sachs Galleries in The David and Peggy Rockefeller Building, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures includes approximately 100 photographs drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition also uses archival materials such as correspondence, historical publications, and oral histories, as well as contemporary voices, to examine the ways in which words inflect our understanding of Lange’s pictures. These new perspectives and responses from artists, scholars, critics, and writers, including Tess Taylor.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition is Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange by poet Tess Taylor, an excerpt of which is featured in the exhibition catalogue. Taylor traces Lange’s winding paths across California during the Great Depression and in its immediate aftermath. Taylor’s hybrid text collages lyric and oral histories against Lange’s own journals and notebook fragments, framing the ways social and ecological injustices of the past rhyme eerily with those of the present.
Praise for Last West
This “NO PROMISED LAND” is “also California,” a landscape shared by Tess Taylor and Dorothea Lange in successive epochs that are “different at the level of atoms,” but familiar, just the same. Scintillatingly rendered by Taylor as conversation, meditation, road trip, and vivid documentary account, Last West tracks the not-so-distant past into the erupting present, taking on as many forms as there are California topographies, and asking deep-set questions like “What does it mean to photograph home?” and “How are you going to get by on just two bucks a day?”
— Forrest Gander
reviews of last west
Los Angeles Review of Books - review by JinJin Xu