Mormon Country Women: With an Introduction by Gordon Thomasson

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was a happy example of a “self-fulfilled” woman. She enjoyed a long and fruitful career as America’s foremost woman photographer, successfully blended her work with that of her husband, historian Paul Taylor, raised a family, and left an artistic legacy to humanity. She was both a photographer and a photo-journalist, wanting to see each picture as an artistic entity, and as part of a larger story. As a result collections such as her studies of migrant farm-workers and the dust-bowl are documentary as well as aesthetic masterpieces. And Dorothea Lange was not held to “sexist” stereotypes. When she did a study of American women it was not to Hollywood that she turned, and not to the false glamour we are known for around the world. Instead she focused on the kind of women she, as a liberated woman, felt made America what it is. Many may object to, or want to escape what she saw, but the American Country Woman series is her statement, and she felt it was a complementary one. The following photographs are selected as representative of that perspective from some three volumes of “Utah” proof-sheets in the Oakland Museum Collection. Dialogue is indebted to the Oakland Museum for their generous help in publishing these photo graphs from the Dorothea Lange Collection. 

Readers interested in more of Dorothea Lange’s work should see Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman (Fort Worth and Los Angeles: The Amon Carter Museum and the Ward Richie Press, 1968), and the photo study of Utah she and Ansel Adams produced in Life, 6 September 1954, 91-100. 

Gordon Thomasson