Exhibition | Capturing the Home Front

On exhibition 17 August - 17 November 2024.

Famous American photographer Dorothea Lange established her reputation as a documentarian when she was commissioned by the government to travel the United States in the 1930s to capture and reveal the devastation wrought on Americans by The Great Depression.

During WWII Lange was commissioned by the US Office of War Information to photograph America’s factories, shipyards and farms as the nation went to war.

Her unvarnished depictions of the forced internment of Japanese Americans from coastal California to inland camps in 1942 were considered too realistic and raw for public consumption and Ansel Adams was commissioned to document the desolate camp at Manzanar in a better light.

In Australia photographers Sam Hood, William Cranstone, Jim Fitzpatrick and Hedley Cullen captured the WWII home front, the sad farewells, the factories, the country towns and our remote internment camps for Japanese and other enemy aliens.

Produced by the Australian National Maritime Museum.

An exhibition supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund.