A Modern-Day Bay Area Poet Recreated the Journey of Legendary Photographer Dorothea Lange

“She inspired me as a model of persistence.” 

So says Tess Taylor, a poet in the Bay Area, who undertook the journey once travelled by Dorothea Lange, the extraordinary woman photographer.

Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, is Taylor’s work in conjunction with the sweeping retrospective of Lange’s work Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).  

Lange documented migrant people—some coming to California for jobs, some leaving farms that had failed in the big act of climate change we now call the Dust Bowl. She also photographed Japanese internment.