Rare Dorothea Lange photos of County Clare

Lange sought out in Ireland the community created by village life and family farming and she implicitly compared the rooted poverty of Irish country people with the uprooted poverty of migrant farm-workers in dust-bowl America.
She saw Irish country people as happy and stable even as their children went barefoot to school. Somewhat idealised, and unrealistic her subjects seem immune to the economic turmoil all around.






Migrant Mother
This is Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph entitled: "Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936."

The historian Linda Gordon has just published a wonderful biography of the iconic photographer of the Depression entitled:
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits  (W.W. Norton, $35)
Lange began her career doing society portraits
in San Francisco, but a growing radicalization led her to photograph the dispos-
sessed, the unemployed, and the inmates of the American-Japanese intern-
ment camps. This biography is also a thoroughly researched cultural history of
America from 1920s Bohemian California through the post-War period



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Clare County Library's Local Studies Centre (The Manse) holds contact prints for c. 2,100 Dorothea Lange Irish photographs gathered in four volumes, the bulk of which are of County Clare. The centre also has a copy of "Life" Magazine, 21 March 1955 ("A rural world in Ireland. Dorothea Lange takes a sympathetic look at the parent stock of a far-flung race as it lives on calmly amid the culture of a bygone day"); the 1996 book "Dorothea Lange's Ireland" (London: Aurum Press); and a DVD copy of the documentary film, "Photos to Send" by Diedre Lynch.