Death of a Valley: Photography By Dorothea Lange & Pirkle Jones

CRITIC’S PICK: This exposition chronicles the destruction of the Berryessa Valley, northeast of San Francisco, as photographed by Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones, and is deemed “a nearly 70-year-old story full of contemporary issues such as water policy, private property rights, land conservation, and local governance vs. state and federal jurisdiction.” In the 1950s, the valley, which included the town of Monticello, was submerged by a dam and the creation of Lake Berryessa to provide water for irrigation and for “recreational purposes.” Lange, famous for her social realist images during the Great Depression, and Pirkle, a protégé of Ansel Adams, had been commissioned by Life to shoot the project, but the magazine declined to publish their work once completed. Some of the photographs appeared instead in Lange’s own publication Aperture, and were then exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and later at the Art Institute of Chicago. The collection was largely forgotten until 2023, when the Booth Museum stepped in and organized the current display; it includes more than 80 images that are described by curators as “historical and cultural documents as well as fantastic twentieth century photographs printed in vintage silver gelatin.” — Kevin C. Madigan