Derive

Award-winning actress’ third powerHouse title, a collection of street photography made during the pandemic in New York City; French for “drift.” The title is taken from Guy Debord’s Theory of the Dérive (1956): “In a dérive (unplanned journey) one drops all their usual motives for movement and action and let themselves be drawn by the attractions—usually urban and the encounters they find there.”

Acclaimed actor and photographer Jessica Lange embraced the onslaught of the pandemic and the initial lockdown in New York City in a remarkably intimate and engaging way: having been tempted to read French philosopher Guy Debord’s landmark text, Theory of the Dérive, (drift), she set out any given day with no destination, no purpose in mind, and observed and engaged in (photographed) what prompted her. The results of these excursions and purposeful, intellectual drifting are gathered in her third powerHouse Books volume, Dérive, at once her most audacious and most ambitious photography project to date: gloriously empty streets, mysteriously bustling with compositional energy; perfectly poised individuals, captured as if unwitting extras staged on set; vivid chiaroscuro, voluminous in a wide-pan tableau. New York City was empty in the first few days of the pandemic, but its bones have never been documented in such a manner before Jessica Lange’s masterful eye.