How does an archive become a poem — and that poem become a play? On October 16, poet and playwright Tess Taylor and art dealer Richard Moore joins Ken Light, Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at UC Berkeley Journalism, for a conversation about documentary poetry, the art of witness, and the making of Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange.

Set against a video installation drawn from Lange’s California archive, Taylor, Moore and Light will explore what it means to carry images and testimony across ninety years — from Lange’s field notebooks and FSA driving reports to the immersive theater piece now touring California. Their conversation will range across the documentary tradition they share: the ethics of looking, the translation between image and word, and what Lange’s unflinching witness asks of artists working in the present.

This event is presented in conjunction with performances of Last West at the Oakland Museum of California, October 17–18.

Format: 5-6PM reception, 6-7:15PM talk

About the speakers

Richard Moore

Richard Moore is an art dealer specializing in photography with expertise in Social Documentary Photography, Dorothea Lange, and Group F64. With over 25 years of experience in the field, he has placed works with major museums and collectors in the United States and Europe. Richard is a member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) and served as president of the association for 4 years. While president, during the 2020 pandemic, Richard initiated the 2021 launch of an ongoing series of online, educational AIPAD Talks, featuring noted curators, collectors, artists, and gallerists.

He previously worked as a graphic designer and art director in New York and California. An avid collector and somewhat obsessive researcher, he is currently digitizing and studying a private archive of Dorothea Lange’s personal files from the last 25 years of her life. He resides in Oakland with his wife and cat.

Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is a poet, playwright, and radio essayist whose work explores memory, place, and cultural reckoning. Her poetry collections include The Forage House, Work & Days (New York Times Ten Best Books of Poetry, 2016), and Rift Zone (Boston Globe 50 Best Books, 2020). She served as the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade, and her work appears in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

Taylor’s Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange began as a collage poem commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the 2020 exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, drawing on two years Taylor spent in the Oakland Museum of California’s Lange archive. It has since grown into a five-voice immersive theater piece — Lange’s own words woven with Taylor’s — that sold out its world premiere at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in fall 2025 and is now in development toward a full run at Marin Theatre Company in spring 2027.

Her sixth poetry collection, Come Bite, arrives from Milkweed Editions in April 2027 — a book of odes and close-attention poems written across a decade of compounding crisis, illustrated throughout with original linocut and woodblock prints by Bay Area printmaker Irenka Pareto.

Ken Light

Ken Light has worked as a freelance documentary photographer for over fifty years, focusing on social issues facing America. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and his work has been published in twelve books, in magazines, exhibitions and numerous anthologies, exhibition catalogues and a variety of media, digital and motion picture.

His most recent book Course of the Empire published by Steidl portrays a decade of mounting tension in a polarized America, from Wall Street to the rural heartland and is a portrait of the American social landscape and is a riveting historical and visual record of a complicated country in a complicated time. Midnight La Frontera (TBW Books) describes in piercing words and in strobe lit images caught against the dark of night, Midnight La Frontera’s immediacy underscores the struggle and defiance of those who make the perilous hike for days and weeks in search of the American Dream. What’s Going On? 1969-1974 explores his earliest work as a young photographer documenting the social landscape of America as it roiled with upheaval. His book Valley of Shadows & Dreams (Heyday Book) was published in 2012. This work was published in the New York Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, N.Y. Review of Books, Huffington Post Voces and this work was exhibited in one person shows at the Oakland Museum of California, Umbrage Gallery, Arte Americas and S.E. Museum of Photography.

His work is part of numerous collections including the San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, Helmut Gernsheim Collection and many others including private collections.