Growing up, I’d never heard of Dorothea Lange. There were no Women’s Studies courses in the 1960s. We knew about Doris Day and Eleanor Roosevelt and sometimes I’d dream about marrying a prince like Grace Kelly – hey, she was born in Pennsylvania like me. And there was always Brigette Bardot and Marilyn Monroe just in case I aspired to be a sex symbol? On second thought, I really wanted to be a comedienne like Carol Burnett.
But Bob and I wanted to see the Frist exhibit of Dorothea Lange before she left the building – the museum is the actual/original Art Deco Nashville Post Office and always amazes me. The exhibit is scheduled to close this weekend so we boogied downtown the other afternoon; I’d admired Lange from the moment I heard about her, a photographer who documented the real human toil of the Great Depression. https://fristartmuseum.org/calendar/detail/dorothea-lange
I wasn’t expecting to cry. I was so moved by her images of families displaced by the economy and dust bowls. Lange is famous for her portraits of migrant women, both white and black which was unusual in itself, but when we got to the pictures of Japanese families sitting, patiently waiting to be deported to internment camps, surrounded by their bags, I wept.
The children had government ID tags on them.
I was touched because I knew that feeling, displacement. It was in my bones and it has never left me.
