Barn, Utah

1941, printed no later than 1965 · Photograph

May one see it?

Not receiving at present

National Gallery of Art

Washington, D.C., United States

It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.

Checked: 10 days ago
In this state since: Aug 19, 2026
Source: The museum

On the map Museum page

Particulars

Accession number: 2016.191.109

What it shows

Landscape Barn Utah Social criticism Rural Depression Era

In the catalog

Photographs Gelatin silver print Modernism 20th century American

Sources

National Gallery of Art
Image: National Gallery of Art — © the artist or rights holder

Meanwhile, in the life of Dorothea Lange

The whole life

1935–1940
Five years on the road with Paul Taylor
For the next five years the couple travelled the California coast and the Midwest, documenting rural poverty, above all the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant labourers: Taylor interviewed people and gathered economic data while Lange made photographs and the accompanying records. They lived and worked from Berkeley for the rest of her life.
1939
The book “An American Exodus” with Paul Taylor
Lange and her husband, the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, were the authors of the book “An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion” (first published in 1939).
1941–1942
Gives up her Guggenheim Fellowship for the WRA
In 1941 Lange became the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for photography, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor she gave it up to work for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), documenting the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the US West Coast.
c. 1942
Photographing the removal of Japanese Americans: Manzanar
Lange travelled through the towns and countryside of California photographing families that the government ordered out of their homes; she visited several temporary assembly centres as they opened and settled on Manzanar, the first of the permanent camps, in eastern California about 300 miles from the coast. The authorities impounded most of these photographs, and they were not seen publicly during the war.
c. 1965
Helps to curate her MoMA retrospective
Shortly before her death Lange helped curate a retrospective of her work for the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it opened three months after she died and was MoMA’s first solo retrospective of a woman photographer.
11 October 1965
Died