Dorothea Lange Part I: Under the Trees

Please note: copyright to Dorothea Lange Part I: Under the Trees is held by WNET. All rights reserved. WNET is the premier public media provider of the New York metropolitan area and parent of public television stations THIRTEEN and WLIW21. Dorothea Lange Part I: Under the Trees was originally produced by KQED for National Educational Television (NET) - the predecessor of WNET - and first aired in 1965. Part I of a documentary film made by the KQED Film Unit, written and narrated by Richard O. Moore, about the life of documentary photographer and photojournalist Dorothea Lange (1895-1965). As Moore puts it in his introduction: "This is not about photography. It is about Dorothea Lange. Who in her long, rich and frequently painful life, has used the camera vastly to enrich our perception of ourselves and of the human condition." Includes scenes of Lange working at her Berkeley family home with husband Paul Taylor, son Dan Dixon and New York Museum of Modern Art's Curator of Photography John Szarkowski, on an exhibition of her work. We are told that Lange is living with esophageal cancer and that in order to work on her exhibition in New York, she has had to give up a project for Look Magazine on photographing a family cabin, by the Pacific coast. Also features views of Lange and Szarkowski discussing which photographs will be shown in New York and close ups of many of her still photographs. At one point Lange reflects on her evolution as an artist and confesses that: "I'm just really beginning to sense what's in this medium ... how much I could have made of the things I actually did, had I understood those negatives as well as I understand them now." This film was directed and edited by Philip Greene and Richard Moore. Oakland Museum loaned their 16mm film print of this film to the TV Archive, to be remastered.

Note that Movette Film Transfer of San Francisco remastered this 16mm negative film print in May 2017 in 2K resolution (2048x1556 pixels), using a Lasergraphics film scanner. Opening graphic designed by Carrie Hawks.