This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features documentary filmmaker Dyanna Taylor and art historian and author Judith Zilczer. 

Taylor is the director of the forthcoming PBS “American Masters” documentary on the life and work of Dorothea Lange. Titled “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning,”the film looks at Lange’s life from her upbringing outside New York City, to her emergence as a major American photographer. Lange is best-known for her work chronicling the Dust Bowl era, but her oeuvre includes much more, including pictures of Depression-era labor strife, the internment of Japanese-Americans and early environmentalist documentary photography. Such was Lange’s stature that just after she died in 1966 the Museum of Modern Art devoted just its sixth retrospective of a photographer’s career to her work. 

“Grab a Hunk of Lightning” premieres on PBS stations on Friday, August 29. Check your local listings to see if your PBS station is airing it at that time.