In the wake of the great success of the retrospective dedicated to Ruth Orkin, the first ever held in Italy on the American photojournalist, the Museo Civico of Bassano del Grappa pays tribute to another woman whose ‘gaze’ gave rise to the genre of documentary photography and shaped its history: Dorothea Lange.

The exhibition Dorothea Lange: The other America will run from 27 October to 4 February 2024. In 1952 Lange co-founded Aperture, the world’s most authoritative magazine on photography. She was also the first woman photographer to whom MoMa dedicated a retrospective, which was held several months before her death in 1965.

Realised in collaboration with CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia di Torino, the exhibition will present 200 shots which span the career of the famous American photographer, with particular emphasis on her production of the 1930s and 40s. Developing a very personal and incisive style in those years, she created photos to foreground themes which are still extremely relevant today: the climate crisis, migration and the various forms of discrimination which characterised the Great Depression in the United States. Her idiom is both blunt and brimming with sophisticated modernist suggestions; her works live ‘beyond time’, given their continued capacity to stimulate reflection and debate in our day. The highlight and novelty of the exhibition is the in-depth look at the origin of the famous, iconic Migrant Mother: a sequence of five shots made by Lange to find the perfect one, together with other powerful photos of migrants taken in that camp, goes into creating a display that is both fascinating and educational. Descriptions of the images will aid visitors in comprehending the process by which an icon came into being.

By means of a broad selection of works from various collections that conserve Lange’s photos (in particular the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington), the exhibition will narrate the golden years of the photographer’s career from the 1930s until the Second World War, in addition to presenting images from both before and after that period. Another section of interest is the series – exhibited for the first time in Italy – of works shot in the detention camps for Japanese-American citizens, who were segregated in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Overall, the exhibition provides visitors with an insight into the great variety and depth of the oeuvre of a photographer who always aimed to give a sincere, firsthand depiction of the world that surrounded her.

Another important chapter in the history of photography thus awaits visitors in Bassano del Grappa.

The exhibition is curated by Walter Guadagnini and Monica Poggi.

Under the patronage of: Regione del Veneto
Official partner: Trenitalia S.p.A.
Official sponsor: pba S.p.A.
Media partner: Radio Birikina & Il Giornale di Vicenza

Information

→ Tel. +39 0424 519901
→ biglietteriamusei@comune.bassano.vi.it

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Reach Bassano del Grappa by train and you will have a discount at the entrance to the exhibition:

→ €2 discount on the full entrance ticket to the Dorothea Lange exhibition. The other America and the permanent collections of the Civic Museum.
→ €3 discount on the full cumulative ticket which includes, in addition to entry to the Dorothea Lange exhibition. The other America and the permanent collections of the Civic Museum, also access to the G. Roi Museum of Ceramics and Remondini Printing at Palazzo Sturm.

You can obtain the discount by presenting your ticket or regional pass, even with supra-regional application, in digital or paper format, valid to reach the Bassano del Grappa station on the same day as entry to the exhibition.

How to reach the museum by train:

From Venice Santa Lucia / Venice Mestre: 32 direct connections per day
From Treviso Centrale: 24 connections per day with changes in Castelfranco Veneto
From Vicenza: 14 connections per day with changes in Cittadella
From Padua: 17 direct connections per day

The promotion is valid every day from 27 October 2023 to 04 February 2024.