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Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
Winner of the 2010 Bancroft Prize and finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography: The definitive biography of a heroic chronicler of America's Depression and one of the twentieth century's greatest photographers. We all know Dorothea Lange's iconic photos―the Migrant Mother holding her child, the shoeless children of the Dust Bowl―but now renowned American historian Linda Gordon brings them to three-dimensional life in this groundbreaking exploration of Lange's transformation into a documentarist. Using Lange's life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, Gordon masterfully re-creates bohemian San Francisco, the Depression, and the Japanese-American internment camps. Accompanied by more than one hundred images―many of them previously unseen and some formerly suppressed―Gordon has written a sparkling, fast-moving story that testifies to her status as one of the most gifted historians of our time. Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; a New York Times Notable Book; New Yorker's A Year's Reading; and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book. 128 black-and-white photos
560 pages, Paperback
First published October 19, 2009
73 people are currently reading
1694 people want to read
About the author
Linda Gordon
49 books65 followersLinda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of numerous books and won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. She lives in New York. "
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
April 16, 2019
The GR book description is excellent, and so it is worthy of repeating here:
“We all know Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos—the “Migrant Mother” holding her child, the gaunt men forlornly waiting in breadlines—but few know the arc of her extraordinary life. In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange’s journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange’s growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange’s entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.”
If the last sentence makes sense to you, Lange’s photography will move you as it does me. It displays the spirit and essence of the entire book.
The book moves forward chronologically. It contains great detail. Yet the detail is put there for a purpose and thus should not be removed. To understand Lange we must understand her family situation. We must understand the trends, leading figures and techniques used by photographers of her era. Last, but not least, one must have knowledge of the socio-political climate. All of this is covered in detail, not in excess, unless what you are looking for is a quick summary of her life.
Lange’s polio at the age of seven and her father’s abandonment of the family when she was twelve shaped her irrevocably. With her father’s departure she chose to switch to her mother’s maiden name.
Lange married twice—in 1920 to the American-West artist Maynard Dixon, the father of a ten-year-old daughter and Lange’s senior by two decades, and in 1935 to the progressive agricultural economist Paul Taylor. He was the same age as her, had been previously married and was the father of three. It was consistently she who shouldered the responsibility for all the children. She had two boys with Maynard Dixon. Along with his daughter and Paul Taylor’s two sons and daughter, there were six to be cared for. They were not rolling in money, so there was no question of hiring help. At the same time, she could not disregard her own need to work with photography! What was to be done with the children was a big problem! Caring for them was not her highest priority, which is not to say she did not love them. The decision to place her two sons in foster homes did have longstanding emotional consequences, both for her and the children. To state that family relationships became complex and wrought anxiety is not to exaggerate. The author not only records the actions taken but also discusses how existing alternatives were viewed in the 1920s. This allows a reader to fairly judge the choices taken.
That is all I will say about the family side of the book—except that the stress under which Dorothea worked led to serious medical consequences. They are thoroughly covered in the book.
Where the book shines is in its examination of Lange’s work, in its discussion of her photos. Many photos are shown in the printed book. The audiobook has no accompanying PDF file, which could / should have shown them. It is however not hard to find them on the web. Regardless of whether the reader observes the photos or not, the author magnificently describes in words what the pictures show and say. In this she has great talent! Her writing goes beyond the requisite of clarity. Her words capture the essence of what Lange’s photos were meant to say.
The writing comes to the fore when the author describes Lange’s work, but you have to have gone through a large part of the book before you get to this point. My appreciation of the book increased the further I progressed. Don’t give up on the book too soon.
All aspects of Lange’s career are covered in detail, as well as her engagement in progressive liberal thinking. Her political leanings were to the left. She was not a communist, nor did she support McCarthyism. Her work during the 1930s for the FSA (Farm Security Administration), during the Second World War for the OWI (Office for War Information), her freelance work at Life, her trips abroad with Taylor and her involvement in the planning of her MoMA exhibition that took place after her death are covered in detail.
Have you noted the frequency with which I use the phrase “in detail”? This is intentional. My aim is to impress upon you that no topic is skimmed. This Is not going to please all readers. It is better to know before you start.
The audiobook is narrated by Kathleen Gati. Her performance I have given three stars. Her speed of narration is very uneven. At times she reads extremely quickly through lines chockful of facts. This exhausted me. When she read rapidly, I was not pleased. Then I swore I would give the performance rating one star, but other sections are read at a good pace. I have compromised, taken an average and given the performance a rating of three stars.
Before I read this book I read a book of historical fiction about Dorothea Lange--Learning to See by Elise Hooper. This I gave three stars. I liked it, but I found it insufficient. Here is a link to my review of that: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Hopefully you can then choose which of the books fit you best.
Or check out Mary Coin by Marisa Silver (3 stars).
Dorothea Lange and her second husband wrote An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion - Dorothea Lange & Paul Taylor together. She and her husband often worked together on the photo captions. Many of these came to be altered or removed before publication.
“We all know Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos—the “Migrant Mother” holding her child, the gaunt men forlornly waiting in breadlines—but few know the arc of her extraordinary life. In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange’s journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange’s growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange’s entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.”
If the last sentence makes sense to you, Lange’s photography will move you as it does me. It displays the spirit and essence of the entire book.
The book moves forward chronologically. It contains great detail. Yet the detail is put there for a purpose and thus should not be removed. To understand Lange we must understand her family situation. We must understand the trends, leading figures and techniques used by photographers of her era. Last, but not least, one must have knowledge of the socio-political climate. All of this is covered in detail, not in excess, unless what you are looking for is a quick summary of her life.
Lange’s polio at the age of seven and her father’s abandonment of the family when she was twelve shaped her irrevocably. With her father’s departure she chose to switch to her mother’s maiden name.
Lange married twice—in 1920 to the American-West artist Maynard Dixon, the father of a ten-year-old daughter and Lange’s senior by two decades, and in 1935 to the progressive agricultural economist Paul Taylor. He was the same age as her, had been previously married and was the father of three. It was consistently she who shouldered the responsibility for all the children. She had two boys with Maynard Dixon. Along with his daughter and Paul Taylor’s two sons and daughter, there were six to be cared for. They were not rolling in money, so there was no question of hiring help. At the same time, she could not disregard her own need to work with photography! What was to be done with the children was a big problem! Caring for them was not her highest priority, which is not to say she did not love them. The decision to place her two sons in foster homes did have longstanding emotional consequences, both for her and the children. To state that family relationships became complex and wrought anxiety is not to exaggerate. The author not only records the actions taken but also discusses how existing alternatives were viewed in the 1920s. This allows a reader to fairly judge the choices taken.
That is all I will say about the family side of the book—except that the stress under which Dorothea worked led to serious medical consequences. They are thoroughly covered in the book.
Where the book shines is in its examination of Lange’s work, in its discussion of her photos. Many photos are shown in the printed book. The audiobook has no accompanying PDF file, which could / should have shown them. It is however not hard to find them on the web. Regardless of whether the reader observes the photos or not, the author magnificently describes in words what the pictures show and say. In this she has great talent! Her writing goes beyond the requisite of clarity. Her words capture the essence of what Lange’s photos were meant to say.
The writing comes to the fore when the author describes Lange’s work, but you have to have gone through a large part of the book before you get to this point. My appreciation of the book increased the further I progressed. Don’t give up on the book too soon.
All aspects of Lange’s career are covered in detail, as well as her engagement in progressive liberal thinking. Her political leanings were to the left. She was not a communist, nor did she support McCarthyism. Her work during the 1930s for the FSA (Farm Security Administration), during the Second World War for the OWI (Office for War Information), her freelance work at Life, her trips abroad with Taylor and her involvement in the planning of her MoMA exhibition that took place after her death are covered in detail.
Have you noted the frequency with which I use the phrase “in detail”? This is intentional. My aim is to impress upon you that no topic is skimmed. This Is not going to please all readers. It is better to know before you start.
The audiobook is narrated by Kathleen Gati. Her performance I have given three stars. Her speed of narration is very uneven. At times she reads extremely quickly through lines chockful of facts. This exhausted me. When she read rapidly, I was not pleased. Then I swore I would give the performance rating one star, but other sections are read at a good pace. I have compromised, taken an average and given the performance a rating of three stars.
Before I read this book I read a book of historical fiction about Dorothea Lange--Learning to See by Elise Hooper. This I gave three stars. I liked it, but I found it insufficient. Here is a link to my review of that: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Hopefully you can then choose which of the books fit you best.
Or check out Mary Coin by Marisa Silver (3 stars).
Dorothea Lange and her second husband wrote An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion - Dorothea Lange & Paul Taylor together. She and her husband often worked together on the photo captions. Many of these came to be altered or removed before publication.
February 7, 2021
A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera. ~ Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange carried scars from her New Jersey childhood throughout her life, physically as a polio survivor and emotionally from the impact of her father leaving the family when she was twelve. She moved with her mother and brother to New York City, where she was an indifferent high school student, but began working in a photography studio and acquired her first camera.
In 1918, she and an adventurous friend set off on a tour that was to circle the globe, but instead ended in San Francisco. Although she did travel extensively in later years, her home base would be the San Francisco/Berkeley area for the rest of her life. She quickly took up photography again and became the city's premier portrait photographer.
Linda Gordon masterfully charts Lange's intense but fraught relationships with her husbands, western artist Maynard Dixon and agricultural economist Paul Taylor, their children, stepchildren, and grandchildren. The stress she experienced as a woman supporting her husbands' careers, pursuing her own, and attending to her extended family resulted in increasingly debilitating ulcers.
The core of the biography is its extensive treatment of her extraordinary career as a photographer, including the iconic Depression-era work she did for the Farm Security Administration, a World War II project for the U.S. Army documenting the relocation of West Coast Japanese citizens to internment camps, that was impounded during the war, and much more.
I highly recommend.
Dorothea Lange carried scars from her New Jersey childhood throughout her life, physically as a polio survivor and emotionally from the impact of her father leaving the family when she was twelve. She moved with her mother and brother to New York City, where she was an indifferent high school student, but began working in a photography studio and acquired her first camera.
In 1918, she and an adventurous friend set off on a tour that was to circle the globe, but instead ended in San Francisco. Although she did travel extensively in later years, her home base would be the San Francisco/Berkeley area for the rest of her life. She quickly took up photography again and became the city's premier portrait photographer.
Linda Gordon masterfully charts Lange's intense but fraught relationships with her husbands, western artist Maynard Dixon and agricultural economist Paul Taylor, their children, stepchildren, and grandchildren. The stress she experienced as a woman supporting her husbands' careers, pursuing her own, and attending to her extended family resulted in increasingly debilitating ulcers.
The core of the biography is its extensive treatment of her extraordinary career as a photographer, including the iconic Depression-era work she did for the Farm Security Administration, a World War II project for the U.S. Army documenting the relocation of West Coast Japanese citizens to internment camps, that was impounded during the war, and much more.
I highly recommend.
Want to read
February 17, 2016
(this made me recall John Steinbeck The grapes of wrath)
UPDATE:
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/t...
http://www.timesdaily.com/life/doroth...
December 1, 2012
If the subject weren't so compelling, I would not have stayed with it. The childhood parts are heavy on speculation as to how a child of this era with polio or separated parents would have felt. Speculation on why Lange accepted the traditional women's domestic roles is similarly overdone. Staying with this book was worth it. Linda Gordon shines in her presentation of Lange's work and its place in its era and ours.
Gordon describes not just how these iconic photos were made, but the life of Lange as she made them. Lange took on (or wound up with) responsibilities for her own two children as well as offspring from her two husbands' previous marriages. There are allusions to neglect, but the children seem to be around more than one would expect from such a busy life. By contrast, Lange's life on the road driving from place to place, relating to the people and taking the photos is very well defined.
Gordon clearly demonstrates why Lange can be considered a photographer for democracy. She writes not just of Lange's work but her commitment towards the social reforms that she hoped her images might inspire. Her work with the FSA dovetailed with her second husband's work in agricultural economics. They were independent professionals as well a team.
There is a good description of the mission and vulnerability of the FSA, its role in the New Deal, its political pressures, office politics and how and why Lange was too often the odd man out. Both Lange and the FSA had to accept the racism of the times. Photos of people of color would not be highlighted since the public would not be inclined to accept them. The agency always had to consider the power of the growers to totally eliminate it.
While we remember Lange for her FSA photos, her work encompasses far more. Most intriguing are the photos of the Japanese internment, many of which are lost to history. Others, such as those done in cooperation with Ansel Adams, were published in mainstream publications. The few "world photographs" reproduced in the book whet your appetite for more.
As the New Deal gave way to a backlash, Gordon provides excellent analysis of the pressures on Lange, her husband and her colleagues. There are discussions on photo documentation, photojournalism and photographic art and analysis of Lange and her role in and opinions regarding each.
The book, besides being rich in analysis it is rich in photos. There are glossy plates and many photos on text pages.
Gordon describes not just how these iconic photos were made, but the life of Lange as she made them. Lange took on (or wound up with) responsibilities for her own two children as well as offspring from her two husbands' previous marriages. There are allusions to neglect, but the children seem to be around more than one would expect from such a busy life. By contrast, Lange's life on the road driving from place to place, relating to the people and taking the photos is very well defined.
Gordon clearly demonstrates why Lange can be considered a photographer for democracy. She writes not just of Lange's work but her commitment towards the social reforms that she hoped her images might inspire. Her work with the FSA dovetailed with her second husband's work in agricultural economics. They were independent professionals as well a team.
There is a good description of the mission and vulnerability of the FSA, its role in the New Deal, its political pressures, office politics and how and why Lange was too often the odd man out. Both Lange and the FSA had to accept the racism of the times. Photos of people of color would not be highlighted since the public would not be inclined to accept them. The agency always had to consider the power of the growers to totally eliminate it.
While we remember Lange for her FSA photos, her work encompasses far more. Most intriguing are the photos of the Japanese internment, many of which are lost to history. Others, such as those done in cooperation with Ansel Adams, were published in mainstream publications. The few "world photographs" reproduced in the book whet your appetite for more.
As the New Deal gave way to a backlash, Gordon provides excellent analysis of the pressures on Lange, her husband and her colleagues. There are discussions on photo documentation, photojournalism and photographic art and analysis of Lange and her role in and opinions regarding each.
The book, besides being rich in analysis it is rich in photos. There are glossy plates and many photos on text pages.
February 3, 2013
I was very disappointed in this, chiefly because I was so interested in the subject. I have a couple books by Dorothea Lange, and I wanted to learn more about her.
The author referenced that Dorothea was not a feminist in 1920, even though her mom was basically the bread winner, and even though Dorothea was the bread winner, and it was the year that suffrage was passed. As a historian the author completely read that scene wrong. The word feminist may not be the appropriate word, but to think she didn't think about women's issues, when was knee deep in them, is to miss the history of the period.
The author referenced that Dorothea didn't keep many journals when she was younger, and the book reflects lack of substance. More information is available during the time she photographed for the government chiefly because records were kept. Maybe this is a case when the subject didn't want to be written about unless she was involved.
I disliked the author's intrusions within the book, "this historian" or "I think" . . . none of that was necessary, and it just added fluff to the book. I probably disagreed with her assessment anyway, she seemed very off the mark for an historian. I didn't trust what she wrote. Her constant remark about Dorothea's limp . . . I didn't know if it was due to Dorothea writing about it or the author's guess. I assumed it was the author's guess, and decided she overstated the issue.
I wish this story was written by someone else.
The author referenced that Dorothea was not a feminist in 1920, even though her mom was basically the bread winner, and even though Dorothea was the bread winner, and it was the year that suffrage was passed. As a historian the author completely read that scene wrong. The word feminist may not be the appropriate word, but to think she didn't think about women's issues, when was knee deep in them, is to miss the history of the period.
The author referenced that Dorothea didn't keep many journals when she was younger, and the book reflects lack of substance. More information is available during the time she photographed for the government chiefly because records were kept. Maybe this is a case when the subject didn't want to be written about unless she was involved.
I disliked the author's intrusions within the book, "this historian" or "I think" . . . none of that was necessary, and it just added fluff to the book. I probably disagreed with her assessment anyway, she seemed very off the mark for an historian. I didn't trust what she wrote. Her constant remark about Dorothea's limp . . . I didn't know if it was due to Dorothea writing about it or the author's guess. I assumed it was the author's guess, and decided she overstated the issue.
I wish this story was written by someone else.
February 22, 2011
This is a historical biography, rather than a biography of an artist. The reproductions of the photographs (in the hardcover edition) are not good. There are few photographs from her early period as a portrait photographer, the style is described in the text, which makes it difficult to establish her starting point. There's minimal discussion of style, technique and influences. Obviously there are many of Lange's photographs to be found in the LOC archive online, from her most prolific and famous period, but where can one find a photographic chronology?
April 5, 2016
Well researched but slighty dull bio of the famed photographer Dorothea Lange. I had put this aside but after viewing an Ansel Adams exhibit I picked it back up. It gets two stars>
April 24, 2010
It took me months to read this book. It was thick with information, facts, and adventures from the life of Dorothea Lange. It was such a rich and interesting biography. I wonder if I didn't just keep putting it down because I wanted it to last. When I did read it I'd read long after bed time.
This book made it clear how difficult it was to make a living as a photographer. Dorothea Lange apprenticed early on with portrait photographers in New York City, later moving to San Francisco where she opened her own upscale portrait studio. She married Maynard Dixon, a Western painter and her life changed dramatically. Her early life in San Francisco reads as an idyllic one even though there were struggles.
I loved reading about the technical aspects of Dorothea Lange's work. The cameras that she used, her work in the darkroom, her struggles to shoot in difficult conditions. Lange's ideas about photography while having an artistic aesthetic were at times very utilitarian and craft oriented. I found it interesting that she didn't have a major retrospective until the year that she died at the MOMA. She was able to help structure the show and went through an arduous process of picking through tens of thousands of negatives. Much of the work that Dorothea did that was well known was owned by the government through her work with the FSA and the RA. The most highly regarded work seemed to come from a ten year period when she worked with migrant farm workers in California. A large body of work that she isn't well known for is her documentation of the Japanese American Interment camps that happened during WWII.
Dorothea Lange's personal life was complex. Her children were often placed out in foster homes for long periods of time while she went on her contracts. This was more common than it seems for many working families at this time. She divorced her first husband and married an agricultural economist named Paul Taylor who she remained married to for the rest of her days.
Of photography Lange said: “This benefit of seeing . . . can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image . . . the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.”
This book made it clear how difficult it was to make a living as a photographer. Dorothea Lange apprenticed early on with portrait photographers in New York City, later moving to San Francisco where she opened her own upscale portrait studio. She married Maynard Dixon, a Western painter and her life changed dramatically. Her early life in San Francisco reads as an idyllic one even though there were struggles.
I loved reading about the technical aspects of Dorothea Lange's work. The cameras that she used, her work in the darkroom, her struggles to shoot in difficult conditions. Lange's ideas about photography while having an artistic aesthetic were at times very utilitarian and craft oriented. I found it interesting that she didn't have a major retrospective until the year that she died at the MOMA. She was able to help structure the show and went through an arduous process of picking through tens of thousands of negatives. Much of the work that Dorothea did that was well known was owned by the government through her work with the FSA and the RA. The most highly regarded work seemed to come from a ten year period when she worked with migrant farm workers in California. A large body of work that she isn't well known for is her documentation of the Japanese American Interment camps that happened during WWII.
Dorothea Lange's personal life was complex. Her children were often placed out in foster homes for long periods of time while she went on her contracts. This was more common than it seems for many working families at this time. She divorced her first husband and married an agricultural economist named Paul Taylor who she remained married to for the rest of her days.
Of photography Lange said: “This benefit of seeing . . . can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image . . . the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.”
March 8, 2016
This biography was published eight years ago, so it is not new or even necessarily noteworthy now; actually, I picked it up from a Women's History Month display because I, of course, recognize and feel oddly drawn to Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother photograph that is now part of our national identity. But as I began exploring this well-written and comprehensive account of Lange's life, I found her story increasingly compelling. Perhaps the theme I appreciated most, was the honesty of her work. She proclaimed neither equality nor feminism nor anti-racism as tenets of her life, yet her legacy speaks of nothing but these principles. I find reflection on her life that much more valuable because of the simplicity with which she approached it: she embraced her principles and the artistic representation thereof not because of an agenda, but because they were right.
Furthermore, I found Lange's photographs themselves oddly relevant to this society, at this time. While political messages currently focus on exploiting fears and creating divisions, Lange's work serves as an historical suggestion that empathy and understanding may be more effective. Her photographs depict poor individuals of many races with equal grace and respect, and in so doing, situate their economic struggles within the context of family, laughter, resilience, and hope. While viewers during Lange's lifetime and since may not all share struggles with poverty--blessedly--we do share joy and determination. By positioning her subjects within these uplifting and universally shared elements of life, Lange invited viewers to relate and connect to her subjects, thus evoking empathy, curiosity, respect, and perhaps even admiration for her subjects that would not have been as affecting, widespread, or long-lasting had Lange merely relied on poverty to evoke emotion. To the extent that her photographs are available today, Lange continues to invite and encourage this notion of seeing beyond ourselves, of commonality, of humanity.
Furthermore, I found Lange's photographs themselves oddly relevant to this society, at this time. While political messages currently focus on exploiting fears and creating divisions, Lange's work serves as an historical suggestion that empathy and understanding may be more effective. Her photographs depict poor individuals of many races with equal grace and respect, and in so doing, situate their economic struggles within the context of family, laughter, resilience, and hope. While viewers during Lange's lifetime and since may not all share struggles with poverty--blessedly--we do share joy and determination. By positioning her subjects within these uplifting and universally shared elements of life, Lange invited viewers to relate and connect to her subjects, thus evoking empathy, curiosity, respect, and perhaps even admiration for her subjects that would not have been as affecting, widespread, or long-lasting had Lange merely relied on poverty to evoke emotion. To the extent that her photographs are available today, Lange continues to invite and encourage this notion of seeing beyond ourselves, of commonality, of humanity.
July 29, 2015
This is the authoritative Dorothea Lange biography. It is exhaustively researched; Lange's own journals and papers were not preserved, so a staggering amount of work was clearly necessary to build up a thoroughly detailed (and responsibly sourced) account of the photographer's life and from beginning to end. As a result, while the style of the narration is approachable, this isn't exactly a beach read. The very depth of the study makes it primarily of interest to those who already have some familiarity with the major issues facing photography from the early 20th century through the 1960s. There are plenty of readers who find, say, parsing out the interpersonal and aesthetic politics of the f/64 group, not as a chore, but as a fascinating window into the history of the medium. For those readers, this book is a gold mine.
August 18, 2012
A fantastic biography--one of the best I've ever read. Gordon conveys an amazingly complex portrait of Lange that is aided by the author's deep knowledge of American history. She is also frank throughout the book about the inherent challenges of writing a biography when relying on recollections that are relayed decades after the fact and from highly personal perspectives. But most importantly, Lange's story itself is engrossing, admirable, and challenging. I'm so glad I read the book as it's provided me with much deeper understanding of her as well as her contemporaries in photography and at the FSA. p.s. Don't be intimidated by the length. About 100 pages are notes and index. And photographs are sprinkled throughout. I got hooked and finished in just over a week.
December 27, 2021
The only thing I knew about Lange was that she had done the famous photo "Migrant Mother." I learned a lot. Lange also did powerful photos in the camps where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. She was passionate about social justice. She had polio when she was young and tremendous health struggles in her last years.
It's not a bad thing to be reminded that a biography comes filtered and shaped by an author rather than being some impossibly clear window through which the reader views a subject. In fact, Gordon's awareness and thoughtfulness about her own art made the introduction especially engaging. There is the occasional sentence that intrusively calls attention to the author though. Overall, Gordon writes clearly and memorably.
It's not a bad thing to be reminded that a biography comes filtered and shaped by an author rather than being some impossibly clear window through which the reader views a subject. In fact, Gordon's awareness and thoughtfulness about her own art made the introduction especially engaging. There is the occasional sentence that intrusively calls attention to the author though. Overall, Gordon writes clearly and memorably.
Read
July 29, 2011I thought this was much more interesting than I would have predicted--she was not someone that you would have wanted to be your mother, which is maybe a telling point about people who are driven in the way that she was--she had passionate relationships with the men in her life, but she was kind of irritable with children. She did assist them in the way you would have expected a father of the time to do--she helped them find their bliss, what career they were suited to. But she was not impressed with her boys (she liked their wives better). But she took some of the most impressive pictures of the great depression that exist.
March 2, 2019
Lange’s artistic prowess is unquestionable, and the book provides a fascinating history of the US from the 20s through the McCarthy era from an unusual, albeit quite privileged, perspective. As biography, however, I didn’t think the book was very well-written. The author’s voice persistently intrudes, she spun some details out of virtually nonexistent evidence, and I thought she kept making unwarranted excuses for the fact that Lange really wasn’t a very nice person. And for a biography of a photographer, the plates and visual material was infuriating: scattered throughout the book, hard to find, and almost impossible to correlate to the development of Lange’s career.
March 24, 2011
Where is my medal?! Can't believe I FINALLY made it through this tortuous book. Great subject but this book reads like a thesis/textbook. I found the author presumptuous and the book rife with conjecture. I read a few pages of this book every night to help me fall asleep - and it worked for six months. Dorothea had a fascinating life but her story would have benefitted from a lighter touch.
June 8, 2012
This not only brings to light a fascinating artist, but meticulously recreates the history, the social awareness, and the contradictions in her life as they shaped and informed her work. At the same time the passion and skill Lange brought to photography are always the first priority for the narrative. One of my new favorite biographies.
Want to read
March 25, 2011My favorite reads are always my impulse purchases. I am very excited to read this. :)
July 11, 2017
Dorothea Lange was an interesting person but this book was so boring...did not finish it.
February 21, 2021
Really 2.5 stars but I rounded down bc this book irked me so much. I read it for a class and I really don't like how the professor is approaching it, so that's part of my negativity here, but certainly not the only reason. The second half of the book is better and the notes and bibliography are probably the most useful part of this book. Gordon makes a lot of overly sentimental, bold yet unsupported claims about Lange's interiority and relationships and I really wish she'd just stuck to Lange's artistry, which really needs no filler to be interesting. When I read through the notes after finishing the book I found myself even more frustrated because Gordon does a terrible job at showing evidence or examples in the text itself even when she had good sources she could have referenced!
The overall tone of this book is that of a smug, meandering, dreamy, condescending, platitude-filled armchair psychologist who never even bothers to tell you corroborating support for their analysis. There are cycles of domestic abuse fleetingly portrayed here with a clumsy ineptitude and white washing. Lange certainly had something of an oppressive gaze, but her work is, overall, excellent and poignant and thoroughly located in her time.
I also dispute Gordon's claim that, though Lange claimed she wasn't a feminist, she "acted like one." No. Lange benefited from the existence of feminism in her lifetime, but being a woman who does literally anything interesting doesn't actually make you a feminist to speak of. Lange was a woman who lived for her art and little else. That is the story I want to know more about, not the fact that she was a shitty mom or domineering housekeeper. What would it be like to truly explore Lange's story in a way less mediated by the voices around her and the ham-handed attempts of a self-admittedly inexpert historian in this field?
The overall tone of this book is that of a smug, meandering, dreamy, condescending, platitude-filled armchair psychologist who never even bothers to tell you corroborating support for their analysis. There are cycles of domestic abuse fleetingly portrayed here with a clumsy ineptitude and white washing. Lange certainly had something of an oppressive gaze, but her work is, overall, excellent and poignant and thoroughly located in her time.
I also dispute Gordon's claim that, though Lange claimed she wasn't a feminist, she "acted like one." No. Lange benefited from the existence of feminism in her lifetime, but being a woman who does literally anything interesting doesn't actually make you a feminist to speak of. Lange was a woman who lived for her art and little else. That is the story I want to know more about, not the fact that she was a shitty mom or domineering housekeeper. What would it be like to truly explore Lange's story in a way less mediated by the voices around her and the ham-handed attempts of a self-admittedly inexpert historian in this field?
August 27, 2024
This is an excellent biography of Lange which also gave me insights into details of the history of her times that I had not previously known and how those details affected her life and her photography. I highly recommend this book.
March 14, 2022
Favorite quotes Pt 1
“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” —Dorothea Lange
“The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable…I have only touched it with this wonderful, democratic instrument, the camera.” —Dorothea Lange
“Despite the miseries and fears it engendered, the Depression created a moment of idealism, imagination, and unity in Americans’ hope for their country.”
“Most of Lange’s photography was optimistic, even utopian, not despite but precisely through its frequent depictions of sadness and deprivation. By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of American democracy. And by showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she simultaneously asserted that gender democracy was possible.”
“It would be a mistake, however, to see Lange’s photography as politically instrumental. Her greatest social purpose was to encourage visual pleasure. Her message—that beauty, intelligence, and moral strength are found among people of all circumstances—has profound political implications, of course. Her greatest commitment, though, was to what she called the ‘visual life.’ This meant discovering and intensifying beauty and our emotional response to it. Her words about this goal were sometimes corny, but her photographs were not. Although not a religious woman, she was rather spiritual, even slightly mystical in sensibility. Yet she never preached and she abhorred the sentimental.”
“In contrast to the archetypal story of a woman’s path to liberation, in which she moves from some financial dependence on a husband to independence, and in contrast to the story of many other women who sacrifice artistic aspirations to marriage and family, Lange was able to become an artist when she got a husband who could support her. When she was still unknown outside her circle of customers, Taylor thought her photography a work of genius and encouraged her to defy the constraints of wifehood and motherhood. A rare equality shaped their marriage. He taught her about the social problems she was photographing, she taught him to see.”
Honoré Daumier said that “photography described everything and explained nothing.”
“In her portrait studio she wanted to reveal the inner, not the outer, life and character of her subjects, and she continued to search for hidden truths in her documentary work.”
“In particular, Lange resisted a central motif of photographic modernism, the use of the camera to express her own inner consciousness. To the best of my knowledge, she never made a self-portrait. This indifference to exploring her own inner life through photography appears, at first, surprising, considering that her success as a portrait photographer rested on her ability to express others’ inner selves. She was hardly devoid of self-love or pride. I cannot explain this reticence; I can only report that she was driven by interest in the outside world. One of Lange’s colleagues, documentary photographer Jack Delano, could have been speaking for her in saying, ‘I have always been motivated not by something inside me that needed to be expressed but rather by the wonder of something I see that I want to share with the rest of the world. I think of myself as a chronicler of my time and feel impelled to probe and probe into the depths of society in search of the essence of truth.”
“What Lange saw in her subjects came partly from her own consciousness. Her portraits of sharecroppers and interned Japanese Americans express her emotions as well as theirs. Yet there is a durable distinction between gazes turned inward and those turned outward. Critic Linda Nochlin pointed out that artistic realism rose as a democratic form, originally reserved for representing the common people, deriving from the anti-aristocratic movements of the nineteenth century. Lange’s realist approach itself was a democratic form, representing others, no matter how plebeian, as autonomous subjects, most certainly not as emanations of herself. She did this through portraiture. Her documentary photography was portrait photography. What made it different was its subjects, and thereby its politics. She looked at the poor as she had looked at the rich, never stereotyping, never pretending ‘to any easy understanding of her subjects,’ in the words of Getty museum curator Judith Keller. ‘Every Lange portrait is complex, and to some degree, inscrutable…She never provides any superficial suggestion that we understand that person immediately.’ That final, impermeable layer of unknowability is the basis of mutual respect and, in turn, the basis of democracy.”
“Like any other personal product, the photographs offer information not only about their subjects but about their maker.”
“All good photography requires visual discipline and imagination, of course. Lange’s particular visual intelligence focused on people. In some of her portraits, she seems to have telepathically connected with her subjects’ emotions, perhaps because they trusted her enough to reveal something of themselves. That trust was repaid in one valuable currency: Lange’s subjects are always good-looking. This was the bread and butter of her studio photography business, of course, but it also became central to her documentary photography. Lange made her documentary subjects handsome not through flattery so much as respect, and when her subjects were farmworkers long deprived of education, health, rest, and nutrition, her respect for them became a political statement. Its effectiveness doubled because the looks of her subjects drew viewers to her photography, allowing them to take pleasure in it even as it documented misery and injustice. Her photographs delivered both beauty and a call for empathy.”
“The photographer’s eye is a skill, not a physiological organ. Lange loved questions pointing out that we see with our brains—and have to be taught. She copied out ‘seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon…We see not only with our eyes but all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.’ Her assistants, her family, her friends—all agreed that she taught them, or tried to teach them, how to see. She believed that sight, like most art, consists of 99 percent hard work. The work never ends: The photographer is ‘continually training his power of vision,’ she said, ‘so that he actually knows if the telegraph pole has two cross beams and how many glass cups…the things we don’t look at anymore.”
“The worst enemy of seeing is conventionalization, Lange knew, and overcoming it requires vigilance. The more we see the ordinary, the less we notice, because the expectation of what we will see overpowers actual observation, and because we hurry. Skilled seeing requires emptying the mind of false and cliched responses, responses that the human brain always creates. One neuropsychologist estimates that visual perception is 90 percent memory, less than 10 percent sensory. Perception is thus mostly inference, and a great photographer wants observers not to infer, but to see anew. Lange struggled in conventionalizing her studio portraiture no less than her documentary. She criticized one of her own photographs by saying, ‘That’s a passing glance. I know I didn’t see it.’ Lange disdained a photograph that failed to bust through commonsense expectations.”
“Her commitment to seeing not only derived from artistic openness but also from refusal to pass by uninvolved.”
“Her responsibility she felt was not to provide solutions to problems, however; she told her students that documentary photographs should ask questions, not provide answers. It is the questioning aspect of Lange’s photographs that remains animated today. Many documentary photographers denounce injustice and suffering. The very best are also wondering. They suggest that the photographer does not understand everything going on in them. There remains a mystery, and this may be their most respectful and challenging message.”
Dorothea Lange said, “I think it [polio] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me.”
“A child thrown into relative independence to an unusual extent and unusually early, she lived with high stress and overwork and she became an adult with a powerful need for control over her environment. To the degree her environment included others, she sometimes needed to control them, too.”
“Looking with concentration could reveal beauty.”
“Once, looking out at the Hackensack Meadows and seeing wash lines against the sky, she said to her companion, ‘To me, that’s beautiful,’ and her companion responded, ‘To you, everything is beautiful.’ This comment brought her another bit of self-knowledge that she had not previously had.”
“Why such strong words? What dangers was she worried about? One could read a protofeminism in these words, a refusal for the safe path for the middle-class woman, of the job stamped female, and of the straight and predictable road it would put her on. They also might imply defiance of the pressure on young people to choose safety at the expense of growth. One could also read a protoartistic commitment here, a desire not to be tempted into a search for security that would make an artistic vocation possible.”
“He taught her how to pose the model: ‘the head is placed, and then…each finger is positioned. The fingers were very important to him, and he said ‘The knees are the eyes of the body.’”
“His supreme pedagogical values, like those of John Dewey, insisted that students must explore, finding their own styles and meaning; that a teacher must never impose or assign but should be open to all that is authentic; that there is beauty in the ordinary, in the products of the ‘folk,’ that the artist must honor the natural, the free. Nothing could have suited Dorothea better. ‘Why he was extraordinary puzzled me ever since…He was an inarticulate man…and he’d hesitate, he’d fumble. He was very gentle and had a very sweet aura…You walked into that dreary room knowing that something was about to happen.’”
“White’s assignments focused on observation and composition, rather than on darkroom and skills. Abstract still life became the foundation of his classes--like the ‘five finger exercises and scales of composition.’ Laura Gilpin recalled. He sent his students to photograph a wrought-iron gate at Columbia, because it was nearby and because they saw it every day but never saw it.”
“Dorothea and Fronsie loved New York and never imagined living anywhere else. But they were restless, too, and in their day, rich girls took premarriage European cultural tours to complement their formal education. Hard workers, Lange and Ahistrom saved up money and decided to do the wealthy girls one better: They would travel around the world. The trip was not an escape—Dorothea denied having been unhappy and thought her desire ‘was a matter of really testing yourself out. Could you or couldn’t you.’ It was to be an adventure, and not one built around photography.’”
“She gave up this security in 1918 to become an art photographer. Dorothea loved her irreverent spirit: ‘generally if you use the word unconventional, you mean someone who breaks the rules—she had no rules.’”
“As a photographer, Kanaga was an original. As a woman fenced in, she was not; she could have been Virgina Woolf’s fictional Shakespeare’s sister, or any woman without a room of one’s own. Her need for her husband and her attraction for dominating men interrupted and ultimately shut down her photographic development. Lange, by contrast, managed to combine career, marriage, and motherhood. This was not a matter of political principle. It was just that her passion for photography would not be confined, and neither would her willfulness.”
“Willingness to travel signified Lange’s primary orientation: to please her clients. Portrait photography is always client-centered work and success depends on one’s ability to sense what the clients will like. ‘I don’t mean pondering to their vanity,’ she said, ‘my personal interpretation was second to the need of the other fellow.’ Lange’s wizardry was that she could often induce them to like what she liked. She stretched their tastes a bit, showed them something unexpected, and she believed that in doing so she was showing them something about themselves that they had not seen before. ‘I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.’”
“The artistic modernism she had imbibed in New York expressed itself in a taste for simplicity and a rejection of conventional finery. She never draped people and she discouraged formal poses. She did not ask her subjects to smile and she preferred them not to wear suits or gowns, but informal clothes, in which they could be more relaxed. She wanted her pictures to be eternal, undated—a desire she would reverse ten years later—so she tried to avoid trendy clothing. She printed her portraits on handmade paper with a deckle edge. And she dated her prints as well as signing them; she wanted this record of her work, even as she discarded her correspondence and any journals she kept.”
“The finished product was to give sitters the sense that they were representing themselves in an individually chosen manner. Lange offered her elite clientele a portraiture that suggested—or ‘revealed,’ she would say—individuality and a deep inner life. She endowed her subject with ‘interiority,’ as Allan Sekula wrote. As Alan Trachtenberg put it, she sought the ‘bodily expression of characteristic inward feeling.’ No doubt her own not-quote-perfect body had honed her sensitivity to posture and gesture as communicative dimensions. Her slight disability, so slight as to be in no way offensive, may have strengthened her customers’ belief in her sensitivity and gentleness. Experiencing her own body as disfigured intensified a soulful quality about her that she could make their education, culture, and sensitivity apparent in her images of them. Portraits signaling depth of character were particularly important to the newly rich or middle class and to those who, unlike Lange’s clients, cared more to be identified with high culture than with wealth. Not that they used high culture only for prestige; they were often passionate lovers of music and art. But their cultural commitments were inseparable from the social position they enjoyed.”
“Culture critic Walter Benjamin argued that photography was a democratic practice because of its reproducibility; and that it abolished the ‘aura’ of prestige surrounding the one-of-a-kind painting. (This judgement was, of course, based on a misunderstanding of how much photographs could be changed in darkrooms.)”
“There is a contradiction here, but one we need not try to resolve. Identities are frequently contradictory, and that of an ambitious woman in 1920 was particularly inconsistent, even paradoxical. Lange loved photography, relishing being a failure of consequence in a community she admired, enjoyed earning her own money. Yet her unacknowledged aspirations leaked out, creating tension between her bohemian free spirits and independent business, and her plan to become a traditional wife and mother.”
“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” —Dorothea Lange
“The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable…I have only touched it with this wonderful, democratic instrument, the camera.” —Dorothea Lange
“Despite the miseries and fears it engendered, the Depression created a moment of idealism, imagination, and unity in Americans’ hope for their country.”
“Most of Lange’s photography was optimistic, even utopian, not despite but precisely through its frequent depictions of sadness and deprivation. By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of American democracy. And by showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she simultaneously asserted that gender democracy was possible.”
“It would be a mistake, however, to see Lange’s photography as politically instrumental. Her greatest social purpose was to encourage visual pleasure. Her message—that beauty, intelligence, and moral strength are found among people of all circumstances—has profound political implications, of course. Her greatest commitment, though, was to what she called the ‘visual life.’ This meant discovering and intensifying beauty and our emotional response to it. Her words about this goal were sometimes corny, but her photographs were not. Although not a religious woman, she was rather spiritual, even slightly mystical in sensibility. Yet she never preached and she abhorred the sentimental.”
“In contrast to the archetypal story of a woman’s path to liberation, in which she moves from some financial dependence on a husband to independence, and in contrast to the story of many other women who sacrifice artistic aspirations to marriage and family, Lange was able to become an artist when she got a husband who could support her. When she was still unknown outside her circle of customers, Taylor thought her photography a work of genius and encouraged her to defy the constraints of wifehood and motherhood. A rare equality shaped their marriage. He taught her about the social problems she was photographing, she taught him to see.”
Honoré Daumier said that “photography described everything and explained nothing.”
“In her portrait studio she wanted to reveal the inner, not the outer, life and character of her subjects, and she continued to search for hidden truths in her documentary work.”
“In particular, Lange resisted a central motif of photographic modernism, the use of the camera to express her own inner consciousness. To the best of my knowledge, she never made a self-portrait. This indifference to exploring her own inner life through photography appears, at first, surprising, considering that her success as a portrait photographer rested on her ability to express others’ inner selves. She was hardly devoid of self-love or pride. I cannot explain this reticence; I can only report that she was driven by interest in the outside world. One of Lange’s colleagues, documentary photographer Jack Delano, could have been speaking for her in saying, ‘I have always been motivated not by something inside me that needed to be expressed but rather by the wonder of something I see that I want to share with the rest of the world. I think of myself as a chronicler of my time and feel impelled to probe and probe into the depths of society in search of the essence of truth.”
“What Lange saw in her subjects came partly from her own consciousness. Her portraits of sharecroppers and interned Japanese Americans express her emotions as well as theirs. Yet there is a durable distinction between gazes turned inward and those turned outward. Critic Linda Nochlin pointed out that artistic realism rose as a democratic form, originally reserved for representing the common people, deriving from the anti-aristocratic movements of the nineteenth century. Lange’s realist approach itself was a democratic form, representing others, no matter how plebeian, as autonomous subjects, most certainly not as emanations of herself. She did this through portraiture. Her documentary photography was portrait photography. What made it different was its subjects, and thereby its politics. She looked at the poor as she had looked at the rich, never stereotyping, never pretending ‘to any easy understanding of her subjects,’ in the words of Getty museum curator Judith Keller. ‘Every Lange portrait is complex, and to some degree, inscrutable…She never provides any superficial suggestion that we understand that person immediately.’ That final, impermeable layer of unknowability is the basis of mutual respect and, in turn, the basis of democracy.”
“Like any other personal product, the photographs offer information not only about their subjects but about their maker.”
“All good photography requires visual discipline and imagination, of course. Lange’s particular visual intelligence focused on people. In some of her portraits, she seems to have telepathically connected with her subjects’ emotions, perhaps because they trusted her enough to reveal something of themselves. That trust was repaid in one valuable currency: Lange’s subjects are always good-looking. This was the bread and butter of her studio photography business, of course, but it also became central to her documentary photography. Lange made her documentary subjects handsome not through flattery so much as respect, and when her subjects were farmworkers long deprived of education, health, rest, and nutrition, her respect for them became a political statement. Its effectiveness doubled because the looks of her subjects drew viewers to her photography, allowing them to take pleasure in it even as it documented misery and injustice. Her photographs delivered both beauty and a call for empathy.”
“The photographer’s eye is a skill, not a physiological organ. Lange loved questions pointing out that we see with our brains—and have to be taught. She copied out ‘seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon…We see not only with our eyes but all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.’ Her assistants, her family, her friends—all agreed that she taught them, or tried to teach them, how to see. She believed that sight, like most art, consists of 99 percent hard work. The work never ends: The photographer is ‘continually training his power of vision,’ she said, ‘so that he actually knows if the telegraph pole has two cross beams and how many glass cups…the things we don’t look at anymore.”
“The worst enemy of seeing is conventionalization, Lange knew, and overcoming it requires vigilance. The more we see the ordinary, the less we notice, because the expectation of what we will see overpowers actual observation, and because we hurry. Skilled seeing requires emptying the mind of false and cliched responses, responses that the human brain always creates. One neuropsychologist estimates that visual perception is 90 percent memory, less than 10 percent sensory. Perception is thus mostly inference, and a great photographer wants observers not to infer, but to see anew. Lange struggled in conventionalizing her studio portraiture no less than her documentary. She criticized one of her own photographs by saying, ‘That’s a passing glance. I know I didn’t see it.’ Lange disdained a photograph that failed to bust through commonsense expectations.”
“Her commitment to seeing not only derived from artistic openness but also from refusal to pass by uninvolved.”
“Her responsibility she felt was not to provide solutions to problems, however; she told her students that documentary photographs should ask questions, not provide answers. It is the questioning aspect of Lange’s photographs that remains animated today. Many documentary photographers denounce injustice and suffering. The very best are also wondering. They suggest that the photographer does not understand everything going on in them. There remains a mystery, and this may be their most respectful and challenging message.”
Dorothea Lange said, “I think it [polio] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me.”
“A child thrown into relative independence to an unusual extent and unusually early, she lived with high stress and overwork and she became an adult with a powerful need for control over her environment. To the degree her environment included others, she sometimes needed to control them, too.”
“Looking with concentration could reveal beauty.”
“Once, looking out at the Hackensack Meadows and seeing wash lines against the sky, she said to her companion, ‘To me, that’s beautiful,’ and her companion responded, ‘To you, everything is beautiful.’ This comment brought her another bit of self-knowledge that she had not previously had.”
“Why such strong words? What dangers was she worried about? One could read a protofeminism in these words, a refusal for the safe path for the middle-class woman, of the job stamped female, and of the straight and predictable road it would put her on. They also might imply defiance of the pressure on young people to choose safety at the expense of growth. One could also read a protoartistic commitment here, a desire not to be tempted into a search for security that would make an artistic vocation possible.”
“He taught her how to pose the model: ‘the head is placed, and then…each finger is positioned. The fingers were very important to him, and he said ‘The knees are the eyes of the body.’”
“His supreme pedagogical values, like those of John Dewey, insisted that students must explore, finding their own styles and meaning; that a teacher must never impose or assign but should be open to all that is authentic; that there is beauty in the ordinary, in the products of the ‘folk,’ that the artist must honor the natural, the free. Nothing could have suited Dorothea better. ‘Why he was extraordinary puzzled me ever since…He was an inarticulate man…and he’d hesitate, he’d fumble. He was very gentle and had a very sweet aura…You walked into that dreary room knowing that something was about to happen.’”
“White’s assignments focused on observation and composition, rather than on darkroom and skills. Abstract still life became the foundation of his classes--like the ‘five finger exercises and scales of composition.’ Laura Gilpin recalled. He sent his students to photograph a wrought-iron gate at Columbia, because it was nearby and because they saw it every day but never saw it.”
“Dorothea and Fronsie loved New York and never imagined living anywhere else. But they were restless, too, and in their day, rich girls took premarriage European cultural tours to complement their formal education. Hard workers, Lange and Ahistrom saved up money and decided to do the wealthy girls one better: They would travel around the world. The trip was not an escape—Dorothea denied having been unhappy and thought her desire ‘was a matter of really testing yourself out. Could you or couldn’t you.’ It was to be an adventure, and not one built around photography.’”
“She gave up this security in 1918 to become an art photographer. Dorothea loved her irreverent spirit: ‘generally if you use the word unconventional, you mean someone who breaks the rules—she had no rules.’”
“As a photographer, Kanaga was an original. As a woman fenced in, she was not; she could have been Virgina Woolf’s fictional Shakespeare’s sister, or any woman without a room of one’s own. Her need for her husband and her attraction for dominating men interrupted and ultimately shut down her photographic development. Lange, by contrast, managed to combine career, marriage, and motherhood. This was not a matter of political principle. It was just that her passion for photography would not be confined, and neither would her willfulness.”
“Willingness to travel signified Lange’s primary orientation: to please her clients. Portrait photography is always client-centered work and success depends on one’s ability to sense what the clients will like. ‘I don’t mean pondering to their vanity,’ she said, ‘my personal interpretation was second to the need of the other fellow.’ Lange’s wizardry was that she could often induce them to like what she liked. She stretched their tastes a bit, showed them something unexpected, and she believed that in doing so she was showing them something about themselves that they had not seen before. ‘I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.’”
“The artistic modernism she had imbibed in New York expressed itself in a taste for simplicity and a rejection of conventional finery. She never draped people and she discouraged formal poses. She did not ask her subjects to smile and she preferred them not to wear suits or gowns, but informal clothes, in which they could be more relaxed. She wanted her pictures to be eternal, undated—a desire she would reverse ten years later—so she tried to avoid trendy clothing. She printed her portraits on handmade paper with a deckle edge. And she dated her prints as well as signing them; she wanted this record of her work, even as she discarded her correspondence and any journals she kept.”
“The finished product was to give sitters the sense that they were representing themselves in an individually chosen manner. Lange offered her elite clientele a portraiture that suggested—or ‘revealed,’ she would say—individuality and a deep inner life. She endowed her subject with ‘interiority,’ as Allan Sekula wrote. As Alan Trachtenberg put it, she sought the ‘bodily expression of characteristic inward feeling.’ No doubt her own not-quote-perfect body had honed her sensitivity to posture and gesture as communicative dimensions. Her slight disability, so slight as to be in no way offensive, may have strengthened her customers’ belief in her sensitivity and gentleness. Experiencing her own body as disfigured intensified a soulful quality about her that she could make their education, culture, and sensitivity apparent in her images of them. Portraits signaling depth of character were particularly important to the newly rich or middle class and to those who, unlike Lange’s clients, cared more to be identified with high culture than with wealth. Not that they used high culture only for prestige; they were often passionate lovers of music and art. But their cultural commitments were inseparable from the social position they enjoyed.”
“Culture critic Walter Benjamin argued that photography was a democratic practice because of its reproducibility; and that it abolished the ‘aura’ of prestige surrounding the one-of-a-kind painting. (This judgement was, of course, based on a misunderstanding of how much photographs could be changed in darkrooms.)”
“There is a contradiction here, but one we need not try to resolve. Identities are frequently contradictory, and that of an ambitious woman in 1920 was particularly inconsistent, even paradoxical. Lange loved photography, relishing being a failure of consequence in a community she admired, enjoyed earning her own money. Yet her unacknowledged aspirations leaked out, creating tension between her bohemian free spirits and independent business, and her plan to become a traditional wife and mother.”
June 29, 2012
Gordon has written a solid biography of the great documentary photographer whose iconic images of Dust Bowl victims were only a part of her outstanding career. Lange began things on the east coast, growing up in New Jersey and attending New York City public schools before going west with a friend as part of what was supposed to be an around the world adventure. They made it as far as San Francisco. Lange made a name for herself there as a portrait photographer but found her true calling as a documentary photographer.
Twice married, first to an artist whom she supported and lastly to an economics professor with whom she partnered on various projects, Lange was a good spouse but not particularly a good parent—Gordon struggles with this aspect of her subject, trying not to be too judgmental but unable to ignore the neglect that Lange and second husband, Paul Taylor, imposed on their children in pursuit of their careers. The children, who provide Gordon with interviews, admire their parents work but resented Lange’s control when she was present and her long absences. (The children were not theirs together but from their respective first marriages. Neither husband were any better as parents.
Gordon writes ably and is a good researcher and synthesizer. She makes a strong case for Lange as an art-photographer who took documentary photographs, who worked relentlessly, overcome numerous handicaps, and provided the same respect for her documentary subjects as she had for her paying customers from her portrait making days. While her husband was sometimes devastated by the lack of change (or even attention) their politically motivated joint projects conjured, Lange was able to find solace in the quality of their work together. In addition to her migrant worker photographs, she took photographs of Southern sharecroppers, the Japanese-American internment (photos that were impounded by the Army, who had hired Lange to document the execution of the internment decision), urban poor, as well as photographs that documented her international travel. (The book is well illustrated.) Many of her images obtained iconic status and her work influenced many subsequent documentary photographers. Smart, independent, driven, Lange lived a full life, and Gordon captures it well.
Twice married, first to an artist whom she supported and lastly to an economics professor with whom she partnered on various projects, Lange was a good spouse but not particularly a good parent—Gordon struggles with this aspect of her subject, trying not to be too judgmental but unable to ignore the neglect that Lange and second husband, Paul Taylor, imposed on their children in pursuit of their careers. The children, who provide Gordon with interviews, admire their parents work but resented Lange’s control when she was present and her long absences. (The children were not theirs together but from their respective first marriages. Neither husband were any better as parents.
Gordon writes ably and is a good researcher and synthesizer. She makes a strong case for Lange as an art-photographer who took documentary photographs, who worked relentlessly, overcome numerous handicaps, and provided the same respect for her documentary subjects as she had for her paying customers from her portrait making days. While her husband was sometimes devastated by the lack of change (or even attention) their politically motivated joint projects conjured, Lange was able to find solace in the quality of their work together. In addition to her migrant worker photographs, she took photographs of Southern sharecroppers, the Japanese-American internment (photos that were impounded by the Army, who had hired Lange to document the execution of the internment decision), urban poor, as well as photographs that documented her international travel. (The book is well illustrated.) Many of her images obtained iconic status and her work influenced many subsequent documentary photographers. Smart, independent, driven, Lange lived a full life, and Gordon captures it well.
September 26, 2019
Summary: A fantastic, detailed, personal biography.
After reading a fictional account of depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange's life, I was excited to learn more about the real woman behind the story. This particular biography has won numerous awards and it was easy to see why. It seems like a definitive account of Lange's life, covering both her personal life and her career in great detail. The physical book itself is of high quality. The paper it was printed on was heavier stock than most books and pictures were both scattered throughout and available on glossy inserts. The pictures were well chosen to enhance the text.
The numerous direct quotes from Lange and those closest to her were a real strength of this book. They helped make me feel that I got to know Lange and the people in her life. They also provided support for the author's claims about how Lange thought about her photography. While the author clearly admires Lange's contribution to photography, her treatment of Lange still seemed even-handed. The diversity of people who were quoted speaking about Lange added to that impression. My one small complaint is that the author explicitly mentioned including fewer of Lange's photos of Japanese-Americans in internment camps because she'd just co-authored a book on that topic. Fortunately, I had that book (we'll get to that next!), but otherwise I'd have felt like I was missing out.
As is, I was trying a bit of an experiment with this book, pairing it with companion books of Lange's photography, each focused on one subject she documented (depression era famers, WWII-driven industrialization, Japanese-Americans in interment camps, and Irish farmers). This worked really well! Each time I got to the period in her life that she was doing this photography, I'd stop and go through the book on that topic. It gave me multiple perspectives on Lange and meant I got to see even more of her work. I'll definitely look for similar pairings I can don in the future.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey
After reading a fictional account of depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange's life, I was excited to learn more about the real woman behind the story. This particular biography has won numerous awards and it was easy to see why. It seems like a definitive account of Lange's life, covering both her personal life and her career in great detail. The physical book itself is of high quality. The paper it was printed on was heavier stock than most books and pictures were both scattered throughout and available on glossy inserts. The pictures were well chosen to enhance the text.
The numerous direct quotes from Lange and those closest to her were a real strength of this book. They helped make me feel that I got to know Lange and the people in her life. They also provided support for the author's claims about how Lange thought about her photography. While the author clearly admires Lange's contribution to photography, her treatment of Lange still seemed even-handed. The diversity of people who were quoted speaking about Lange added to that impression. My one small complaint is that the author explicitly mentioned including fewer of Lange's photos of Japanese-Americans in internment camps because she'd just co-authored a book on that topic. Fortunately, I had that book (we'll get to that next!), but otherwise I'd have felt like I was missing out.
As is, I was trying a bit of an experiment with this book, pairing it with companion books of Lange's photography, each focused on one subject she documented (depression era famers, WWII-driven industrialization, Japanese-Americans in interment camps, and Irish farmers). This worked really well! Each time I got to the period in her life that she was doing this photography, I'd stop and go through the book on that topic. It gave me multiple perspectives on Lange and meant I got to see even more of her work. I'll definitely look for similar pairings I can don in the future.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey
January 6, 2016
This is an in-depth biography of a woman I am fascinated with, because she was a social activist, documentary photographer, mother, feminist and a lover of the America West. Lange is famous for her photographs of the Depression, especially migrant workers, but there is so much more to her than that. I found her because she photographed my hometown of St. George in 1953 for Life magazine, and I love those particular photos. Reading this book, I learned that she was married to the artist, Maynard Dixon, and that opened up a whole new dimension of her Utah connection. (Dixon had a home in Mt. Carmel in the later years of his life, and painted many Utah landscapes. He has a connection to the desert like I do. ) This book is densely written and it took me several weeks to read. It taught me about her childhood in New York, her love of the San Francisco Bay Area, her polio, her pioneering work in documentary photography, her determination to have a career even at the cost of her mothering, her second marriage to a man who adored her, and most of all, her eccentric personality. Did you know she and Maynard were instrumental in the design of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1933, even choosing its iconic color? That she and Ansel Adams were friends and co-workers? I wanted to know more. So, of course, I have ordered a few more volumes from Amazon and I will keep you updated. The only problem with this book was the author’s strange tic of stepping outside the narrative and commenting on it from her own point of view. It was jarring. I didn’t want her opinions. This is just a preference I have in reading biographies. But overall, it was well done. Here’s a quote from Lange describing her photographic essay approach: “…a single photograph, it’s provocative, it’s an idea, but if you can do two or three maybe you make of that a phrase and if you can do it in ten maybe it’s a sentence. It’s a hard obscure language, but it’s worth studying.”
July 5, 2010
An excellent biography of the great photographer. Linda Gordon provided a substantial amount if well-documented research related to the life of Dorothea Lange and the struggles she had as a photographer dealing with a "white male" world. In addition, Lange' lifelong battle with polio, which she contracted as a child, are discussed. Lange's two marriages, her children and step-children, are also well-researched and add to an understanding of both her character and challenges. The book also covers the history of the time, the agonies of those struggling through the Great Depression, the successes and failures of the New Deal. While Lange is best known for her photographs of migrant workers and victims of the Great Depression, also covered are life in Bohemian San Francisco in the 1920's, World War II, the Japanese internment camps, and post-war life.
July 15, 2013
Great book. Dense, took me a while to get through but in the end I am so glad I did. Almost my entire view of Dorothea Lange was her work at the FSA and Migrant Mother. This book confirms that her most fruitful work was during those ten years with the FSA but to learn how she got there, what drove her passion, what she did after the FSA and how love and family played a part gave me a much larger picture of her. Not only do I know more about her but reading about her approach to photography informs my own as well. She was no feminist which surprised me. She was a woman with a career her priority was also making a home and her family so she spent long periods away from photography when her family needed her.
I recommend this book if you are
1. interested in the FSA work
2. interested in biographies of early photographers.
I recommend this book if you are
1. interested in the FSA work
2. interested in biographies of early photographers.
July 24, 2010
Gordon does an excellent job of finding and synthesizing primary source material about Dorothea Lange into this revealing biography. She appropriately situates Lange in the bohemian context of the 1920s and 1930s and then details her seminal work with the WPA during the Depression and the military during WWII.
Gordon talks about Lange's competing interests between work and home and her contradictory impulses to be simultaneously an independent artist and a "good wife."
I only wish Gordon had spent more time discussing the social and political implications of Lange's work and her photography.
Gordon talks about Lange's competing interests between work and home and her contradictory impulses to be simultaneously an independent artist and a "good wife."
I only wish Gordon had spent more time discussing the social and political implications of Lange's work and her photography.
May 28, 2012
Linda Gordon manages to balance a scholarly appraisal of Lange's career with stories from her private life. This is done without seeming too academic or sensational. Gordon dubs Lange the "Photographer of Democracy" for her commitment to using documentary photography to communicate and promote American ideals through images of ordinary people. While exploring this the theme, Gordon paints a picture of a complex and sometimes contradictory woman who overcame disability in pursuit of her life's work. A great read for anyone who loves photography, biography, women's history, or early 20th century American history.
June 30, 2017
Very good biography of Lange, the iconic photographer. Lange is an elusive subject, by Gordon's own estimation, and Gordon does an admirable job telling her story despite a dearth of primary source material. The woman that emerges made some tough choices in her personal life, and Gordon rightly refuses to judge Lange's decision, for example, to place her children in foster care for a time in order to pursue her work. I found the sections relaying historical and political movements especially compelling.
May 25, 2011
An interesting biography of an interesting photographer. I always enjoyed Dorothea Lange's photographs of the 30s and 40s. It was interesting to read how she became interested in photography and how she developed as a photographer. Sometimes her family and relationships suffered because of her dedication to photography. The book answered a lot of the questions I had about how she looked at the world and how she photographed it. Plus it discussed the photographers who influenced her and who were influenced by her. If you enjoy photography or biographies, this is a good book.
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