Sarah Greenough

An expansive look at portraiture, identity, and inequality as seen in Dorothea Lange’s iconic photographs Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) aimed to make pictures that were, in her words, “important and useful.” Her decades-long investigation of how photography could articulate people’s core values and sense of self helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice. Lange’s sensitive portraits showing the common humanity of often marginalized people were pivotal to public understanding of vast social problems in the twentieth century. Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as her depictions of striking workers, migrant farmers, rural African Americans, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Drawing on new research, the authors look at Lange’s roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely seen photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic, and racial inequalities—topics that remain as relevant for our times as they were for hers. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, WashingtonExhibition Schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (November 5, 2023–March 31, 2024)

In this expansive monograph, Robert Adams’ compelling and provocative photographs explore the profound questions of our responsibility to the land and the moral dilemmas of progress. Working in Colorado, California, and Oregon from 1965 to 2015, Adams photographed suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and the land itself, seeking to reveal both the ravages we have inflicted on the land and its underlying, enduring beauty. His photographs of the western American landscape are imbued with a sense of the sacred. Adams transforms “the silence of light” he sees on the prairie, in the woods, and by the ocean into pictures that not only capture that beauty but can also question our own silent complicity in its desecration by consumerism, industrialization, and the lack of environmental stewardship. This substantial body of work—passionate but restrained, respectful but outraged—is united by the reverential way Adams looks at the world around him, and the almost palpable silence that permeates his art. Copublished by the National Gallery of Art and Aperture

Photography Reinvented brings together thirty-five works by eighteen critically acclaimed artists who, through innovative experimentation and visionary conceptual scope, have changed the course of contemporary photography. From the seemingly objective, straightforward style and large-scale, vibrantly colored prints of famed Dusseldorf School photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff to works by groundbreaking contemporary artists, including Thomas Demand, Vik Muniz, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Catherine Opie, Photography Reinvented traces the aesthetic, technical, and philosophical shifts of the art form during a period of substantial change. Some of the artists, such as Sherman and Demand as well as Muniz and John Baldessari, explore the nature of photography as a medium that appropriates imagery from mass culture and other sources. Others, such as Hofer and Struth, have reassessed iconic works of art and architecture, revealing the relevance of the past in our present lives. And all of these artists have made large-scale prints that create new and strangely destabilizing experiences of space for their viewers. In an age when photography can no longer claim documentary veracity as its raison d'etre, Photography Reinvented examines the medium's redefinition, repurposing, and reimagining. Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington September 30, 2016-January 29, 2017

In 1949 Georgia O’Keeffe chose the National Gallery of Art as the custodian of nearly 1,600 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz – the Key Set, as it has become known. With the formation in 1990 of the Gallery’s department of photographs under Sarah Greenough, the collection has grown to 14,000 works of art, an assemblage that both charts the development of the medium and reveals the beauty and dynamic versatility of photography over its course of more than 175 years. This elegant book presents some of the most significant and compelling photographs acquired over the years, ranging from experimental photographs made in the earliest years of the medium’s history to key works by major twentieth-century figures and contemporary pieces that reset the ways in which photography shapes our experience of the modern world. The guides on this enlightening walk through the history of the medium are members of the extraordinary curatorial team that established the National Gallery’s international reputation for photography exhibitions and publications over the past twenty-five years, ever advancing the recognition of photography as a fine art.

An American Vision