Day Sleeper

Day Sleeper is an unusual collaboration: photographer Sam Contis working entirely from the archive of Dorothea Lange to build a book that is neither a retrospective nor a reissue. Given access to Lange's fuller archive, including material rarely or never shown, Contis organizes the book not around geography or chronology but around a recurring figure: someone caught resting in daylight, treated as an emblem of both respite and withdrawal. The sequence includes previously unseen photographs of Lange's own family, studio portraits, and street scenes from San Francisco and the East Bay, areas of her practice that receive far less attention than her Dust Bowl and migrant labor work.

The project functions as a portrait of one artist seen and re-edited through the sensibility of another, with Contis responding to formal and emotional resonances between her own photographic instincts and Lange's rather than simply curating a selection. Released to coincide with the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures at MoMA, it has been read as a genuine reconsideration of Lange's range. 140 pages, OTA-bound softcover with jacket.