Getty Museum

Egypt

Date

1962–1963

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> The scarves that Isadora Duncan performed with when Dorothea Lange saw her dance at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1908 had a substantial effect on the girl, as did Duncan's movements, loose tunic, and barefoot style. Her use of scarves served to highlight or extend her gestures, not to conceal. Lange, however, probably noted the multiple purposes of this feminine device: modifying one's appearance, punctuating one's actions, emphasizing emotional moment. She would exploit the sculptural qualities of shawls and blankets, as did her first husband, the artist Maynard Dixon, when she worked with Native American women in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1920s and early 1930s. Documenting farm women during the mid-1930s, she employed their customary bonnets as a similar framing device to set off the lean Anglo-Saxon profiles and to enhance the suggestion of an isolated, or insular, existence. In the late 1950s Lange found the elderly Irish farm women, who wrapped themselves in black shawls, a distinctive subject. > > Three pictures, made by Lange in Central Asia and the Middle East, indicate not only the way she represented the many "covered women" she described in her letters but also her appreciation for the way men in the region might choose to mask parts of themselves in non-Western fashion. ([2000.50.44](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/128422) and [2000.43.16](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/129315)) Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 88. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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