The Three Churches: Catholic, Baptist, and Lutheran, Dixon, South Dakota, July 28

Details

DOROTHEA LANGE
The Three Churches: Catholic, Baptist, and Lutheran, Dixon, South Dakota, July 28
Gelatin silver print. 1941. Signed and dated 1942 in pencil, titled, dated and annotated "All men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience..." Virginia Bill of Rights, 1776 in ink on the mount.
10¼ x 10½in. (26 x 26.7cm.)

Provenance

From the artist;
to Hazel Larsen Archer;
by descent to the present owner.

Literature

See: Heyman et al., Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, pl. 112, for a variant cropping.

Lot Essay

The Three Churches, 1941 was made during Lange's Guggenheim fellowship. Her aim was to document three religious communities in rural America - the Hutterites, the Amish, and the Mormons. However, in this view, taken on the plains in South Dakota, she seems to have stumbled on three more traditional denominations - Catholic, Baptist, and Lutheran - each within earshot of the other. On the mount she has inscribed a quote from Section 16 of the Virginia Bill of Rights, 1776 reiterating the religious freedoms of all.

Lange gave the photograph to her friend Hazel Larsen Archer, a student and teacher at Black Mountain College.

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