What I saw at the museum is what I see on the news.
Inside the Nevada Museum of Art, three black-and-white photographs, taken in 1942 by documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, are lined up in a row on the wall. In the first one, Japanese Americans are huddled in a dense mass on a San Francisco street as police stand guard. They are waiting to be relocated to prison camps under order of the U.S. military. In another photo, a man at an internment camp in Manzanar, Calif., gazes back at us, his expression resolute against the grey sky. His pudgy infant grandson hangs on his neck, piggy-back style. In the third photo, there are no people, just the eerie façade of a grocery store bearing a sign that reads “I AM AN AMERICAN” beneath another announcing that the store has been sold.
Outside of the museum, my laptop and smartphone screens display high-resolution color images of the same process of dehumanization, on repeat. In one, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem tour a hastily constructed migrant-detention center in Florida. They are sweaty and pompous over the punishment this warehouse full of 5,000 empty metal bunk beds could dole out to a largely Hispanic immigrant population in the coming months.
The photos in the museum are part of Dorothea Lange: Seeing People, a retrospective exhibition curated by Philip Brookman of the National Gallery of Art. Seeing People was already highly relevant when it debuted at the Washington, D.C., gallery in 2023, and the impact of has only appreciated since it traveled west to Nevada in April as part of the National Gallery’s Across the Nation Program. As an aggressive second Trump administration attempts to make good on its campaign promise to conduct the largest deportation program in U.S. history, Lange’s iconic photos have become even more significant.
The way Brookman has ordered Lange’s photos helps construct an important visual narrative. The Japanese American man and his tiny grandson could be two of countless people in that first faceless crowd, and they are what is missing in the final storefront still-life. This central photograph individualizes those imprisoned en masse by capturing a moment of tenderness and strength that is completely incompatible with the internment camp setting. By providing this humanizing insight into the lives of those depicted, Lange provides viewers with essential context amid cruelty.
Although Lange was commissioned by the War Relocation Authority to document the forced internment of Japanese Americans, the federal government did not release the photos she produced until after the end of World War II. As the exhibition text notes, authorities feared that Lange’s images would elicit too much sympathy from the rest of the American public. It is difficult to garner support for mass violence when people are intimate witnesses to the humanity of its victims.
In Seeing People, Brookman frames Lange’s long career, and the social issues she photographed, through the lens of portraiture. According to Brookman, Lange’s past experience as a studio-portrait photographer taught her how to capture the unique character of individual people as a documentary photographer.
“What you see in Lange’s studio portraits is serious attention to lighting, place and her subject’s pose, often with particular attention to their hands,” said Brookman. “She incorporates these same strategies in making her documentary pictures in the field, bringing that empathy and connection with people out of her studio and into the homes, streets and fields of America.”
As a portrait photographer in her San Francisco studio, Lange photographed prominent, wealthy figures until in 1933, when she was compelled by the worsening conditions of the Great Depression to take her cameras out into the city. There, she documented breadlines, strikes and organized labor demonstrations. She was later commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document the conditions of unemployment and poverty.
Lange continued to document social issues in the field, and as her career progressed, her work was influenced by the field of sociology. She conducted interviews with her subjects and often made long captions that relayed the information they told her about themselves. By including their perspectives, Lange conveys to her audience details that we couldn’t read in the images alone.
Lange’s photos—which documented the effects of economic inequality, racism, labor, migration and climate change—have remained relevant since she first made them almost a century ago. But by mid-2025, Seeing People makes strikingly apparent the ways in which the history Lange documented in the 20th century is, as photographer Carolyn Drake put it, “playing out right now almost 100 years later in a very different image-world.”
While Lange’s work often showed us the invisible character of her subjects, other images make the individual humanity of entire groups of people invisible. Photos and videos, like the ones that came out of the Trump administration’s tour of “Alligator Alcatraz,” circulate alongside images and language that attempt to criminalize Hispanic immigrants. While the work of some contemporary photographers—like Victor J. Blue’s recent photo essay in Mother Jones—provides us with empathetic perspectives akin to Lange’s, it is conspicuously absent from anti-immigrant messaging. In our present, image-oversaturated world, it is easy for documentary work like Blue’s to be drowned out by narratives that attempt to obscure the whole story.
On this front, Seeing People may be able to offer wisdom for the digital age. “Media literacy … understanding how to read photographs … that’s really important in the culture now,” said Brookman. “In some ways, that’s what museum exhibitions like this one can do—help ask questions about ethics, and about what’s true and what’s not true in the pictures you’re seeing.”
Prompting questions about ethics, truth and how we may learn from historical mistakes is an essential responsibility of institutions like museums. Our social-media feeds do not have the same responsibility. Trump has cut federal funding for the arts and humanities precisely because the lessons these programs and institutions offer undermine the authoritarian narratives he is attempting to construct.
In January, the National Gallery of Art, which receives the majority of its funding through Congress, ended its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. This came as the result of a Trump executive order that ended DEI across all federal agencies and institutions, and referred to such programs as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.” When asked if measures like these have made his work as curator at the National Gallery more challenging, Brookman said, well, not exactly.
“There’s so much scrutiny of what cultural organizations are doing now, and it’s always been that way,” he said. “So for me, it’s not different … it may be more out in the open now, but it’s always been there.”
Dorothea Lange: Seeing People is on view at the Nevada Museum of Art, at 160 W. Liberty St., in Reno, through Feb. 16, 2026. Learn more at www.nevadaart.org.
This article was produced by Double Scoop, Nevada’s source for visual arts news.