Welcome
DARING TO LOOK presents never-before-published photographs and texts by the great photographer of America’s migrant and displaced people, Dorothea Lange.
“No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually,” Lange said, “I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.” But Dorothea Lange did dare to look, with courage and purpose.
Her eloquent reports from the field of a single significant, year, 1939, in the depth of the Great Depression, portray America’s massive upheaval and resettlement, its private greed and environmental degradation, its public miscalculations, and its efforts to restore hope. They also preserve an extraordinary moment in history, capturing a country and a people suspended on the brink of cataclysmic change.
Lange held up her mirror to American society that we might see who we were, how we came to be, and what we were in the process of becoming. Her words and photographs speak powerfully to the present, for the dynamics she saw and recorded are still shaping American lives and landscapes.
Welcome to DARING TO LOOK, a website designed to enrich and extend the experience of reading the book.