DOROTHEA LANGE: GRAB A HUNK OF LIGHTNING
Documentary Feature
Explore, through her granddaughter’s eyes, the life story of Dorothea Lange, the photographer who captured the iconic image “Migrant Mother”. Never-seen-before photos, film footage, interviews, family memories, and journals reveal the artist who challenged America to know itself.
Lange’s enduring images document five turbulent decades of American history, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II Japanese American Internment camps, and early environmentalism. Yet few know the story, struggles, and profound body of work of the woman behind the camera. Award winning cinematographer Dyanna Taylor, Lange’s granddaughter, directs and narrates this intimate documentary as it explores Lange’s life, probes the nature of her muses – two great men and the camera itself – and her uncompromising vision. Taylor, who learned to see the visual world at her grandmother’s feet, weaves Lange’s preparations for her career retrospective at New York’s MoMA into a universal story of a woman’s struggle to live a creative life.
Director Biography
Dyanna Taylor is a five-time Emmy award winning Cinematographer and Director of Photography whose prominent career in documentaries and features has also earned her a Peabody Award and the honored Muse Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Vision and Achievement in Cinematography from New York Women in Film and Television.
She has traveled the world lensing and directing films, documentaries, and television specials on social issues and environmental/wildlife concerns. Her extensive credits include work for all of the major network and cable media organizations including HBO, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS and Nat Geo. Recently, she was 2nd Unit Director of Photography for the Disney feature McFarland, released in spring of 2015, Director of Photography for, just released, Sleepless in America for National Geographic and currently DP for Who Will Write our History, in production and filming in Warsaw and Prague.
A Buddhist, lover of animals and the natural world, Taylor also co-leads the “Wisdom of No Technology Media Makers” retreats, and just completed the 4th annual media retreat in the mountains of New Mexico.
Her film: Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning, has special meaning for Taylor. She is Lange’s granddaughter, and has been deeply influenced by her grandmother’s sensibility and esthetic. This relationship has given Taylor access to never-before-seen footage, photographs, and journals. Combining Taylor’s memories and personal understanding with thorough scholarship, her film gives the viewer both an understanding and felt sense of the woman whose influential 20th century work revealed America to America.
