We’re gearing up for a very exciting season ahead and in anticipation of our production of Kevin McKeon’s  stage adaptation of David Guterson’s Snow Falling On Cedars coming up in January wanted to give you an APB on a riveting (and Snow-relevant) public program happening this week.

Linda Gordon, NYU historian and Bancroft-prize winning author of  The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, will give a talk  entitled “Impounded: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, ” on Friday, October 9, 4:30 p.m., Vollum lecture hall, at Reed College.

While working on a project about photographer Dorothea Lange and American democracy (Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, forthcoming, October 2009), Gordon discovered a group of Lange photographs, long unnoticed and never published, of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Although commissioned by the U.S. Army, the photographs had been impounded because they were too critical of the internment policy. Gordon selected 119 of these images and published them, with introductory essays by herself and , as Impounded: Dorothea Lange and Japanese Americans in World War II (2006).

Gordon is in town in conjunction with a new exhibit of Dorothea Lange’s documentary photographs of the Great Depression in Oregon taken in 1939. Dorothea Lange visited Oregon to produce over 500 photos of the people and rural environment of the Willamette Valley, Malheur County, Columbia and Klamath Basins for FDR’s newly created Farm Security Adminstration. She is also speaking about Dorothea Lange’s Farm Security Administration photos at Portland State University and at Wordstock 2009.

Look for more programs on the horizon in conjunction with Snow Falling On Cedars, in partnership with the Multnomah Public Library, Oregon Nikkei Endowment, Colored Pencils,  Literary Arts, the Minidoka Swing Band and much more!