By Tess Taylor. Museum of Modern Art, 2020. 

In Last West, Tess Taylor follows Dorothea Lange’s 1935-1942 paths across California, journeys on which Lange photographed migrant laborers, carrot pickers, dust bowl refugees, tent camps, and the painful realities of Japanese internment. Taylor’s hybrid texts collage lyric and oral histories against Lange’s own journals and notebook fragments, framing the ways the social and ecological injustices of the past rhyme eerily with those of the present. The result is a stunning meditation on movement, landscape, and place.

In Last West, Taylor retraces the journeys of Depression era photographer Dorothea Lange through California, showing how the social and ecological injustices of the past chime eerily against the present. That work is part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.