Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

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Overview

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 ...

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Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

David Oshinsky
Gordon expertly analyzes the political culture of Depression-era California, where the enormous power of big agriculture kept tens of thousands of landless workers in peonage and despair. She portrays Lange as an ambivalent radical, deeply sympathetic to the plight of the migrants yet uncomfortable with the chaos that social conflict inevitably produced…Gordon's elegant biography is testament to Lange's gift for challenging her country to open its eyes.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by Kirstin Downey

Historian Linda Gordon presents us with a portrait of the artist as a woman in her fascinating new biography of photographer Dorothea Lange [1895-1965], who captured the images of Americans on the move during the Great Depression.

Lange's most famous picture features a migrant woman in California, a refugee from the Dust Bowl. She sits by the side of the road in her lean-to tent, her children draped on her body, hanging from her haggard frame like dead weights, as she stoically looks out into the distance.

But the book's central focus is the journey made by the woman standing behind the camera lens. Lange was raised on New York City's Lower East Side and overcame obstacles almost from the start. During her childhood, her parents separated, which Dorothea experienced as a desertion by her father, and a bout of childhood polio left her with a permanent limp. She spotted an opportunity, however, in photography, which was a burgeoning new art field. Dorothea apprenticed herself to a master to learn the craft, giving herself a new identity. She dropped her childhood name, Dorothea Nutzhorn, and adopted her mother's maiden name instead.

She further redefined herself after making a westward trek in 1918. Within two years, she emerged as a prosperous society photographer in San Francisco who specialized in portraiture of the city's elite, but that work dried up in the 1930s. Lange shifted course again, becoming a documentary photographer for New Deal programs. From 1935 to 1941, Lange was virtually a migrant worker herself, traveling from place to place, photographing farm workers in fields and primitive labor camps.

Gordon wrestles with the issue of howLange dealt with her role as a woman in a society where family burdens are disproportionately borne by females. Raising a large brood of children and stepchildren, Lange frequently had to put her own work aside to run the household. She also became the primary breadwinner for her first husband, cowboy artist Maynard Dixon, and later supported the career of her second husband, economist and diplomat Paul Taylor, despite her own failing health.

Lange privately railed at her family obligations. She shipped the children away when their care conflicted with her schedule or that of her respective husbands. And sometimes she could be cruel: she took revenge on her adolescent stepdaughter, whose father dumped her in Dorothea's lap for months at a time, criticizing and carping at her and photographing her in ways that an adolescent girl would likely have found humiliating.

Dorothea Lange's talented eye brings the Great Depression home for us even today, but an observer might suggest that Dorothea, despite her fame and talent, was as much a captive of a woman's societal roles as the migrant mother she so brilliantly photographed. (Oct.)

Kirstin Downey is a former staff writer at the Washington Post and author of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (Doubleday/Talese).

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Riveting portrait of one of America's most renowned photographers. In addition to providing insight into Dorothea Lange's private life (1895-1965) and professional development, Gordon (History/New York Univ.; The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 1999, etc.) explores the wider context in which she lived and worked. The author's careful scholarship reveals the connection between Lange's work and the sociopolitical environment surrounding her, while still portraying her as a normal, flawed human being. Lange is famous for her Depression-era photographs of breadlines and migrant farm workers, yet her career also spanned two World Wars, the rise of fascism and communism, the beginnings of feminism and the civil-rights movement. A successful portrait photographer in San Francisco for more than a decade, Lange left behind her thriving business in the mid-1930s to pursue documentary photography in pursuit of social justice. Because Lange kept no personal papers or diaries prior to 1935, however, Gordon makes several educated guesses about events during this largely undocumented period; the author's periodic interjections alert readers to the differences between known fact and authorial supposition. Gordon deftly leads readers through the labyrinth of Lange's life-her apprenticeships with Arnold Genthe and Clarence White, her marriage to painter Maynard Dixon, her work with the Farm Security Administration during the Depression-providing a personal, intimate tour of the photographer's life and work. Though largely sympathetic, Gordon doesn't shy away from depicting Lange's sometimes questionable decisions regarding her personal life. A rigorously constructed, entertaining biography. Author tour toNew York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780393057300
  • Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
  • Publication date: 10/19/2009
  • Pages: 560
  • Sales rank: 547,392
  • Series: Life of Herbert Hoover Series
  • Product dimensions: 6.40 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of numerous books including Dorothea Lange and Impounded, and won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. She lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction "A Camera Is a Tool for Learning How to See ..."

Pt. I Hoboken and San Francisco 1895-1931

Scene 1 3

1 Child of Iron, Wounded 4

2 Apprentice to the City 21

3 Becoming a Photographer 42

4 Maynard Dixon, Bohemian Artist 65

5 Working Mother in Bohemia 75

Pt. II Depression and Renewal 1932-1935

Scene 2 103

6 Leaving the Children, Leaving the Studio 105

7 A New Deal for Artists 121

8 Paul Schuster Taylor, Maverick Economist 140

9 The Romance of Love, the Romance of the Cause 155

10 Blending a Family 175

Pt. III Creating Documentary Photography 1935-1939

Scene 3 191

11 Father Stryker and the Beloved Community 193

12 On the Road: California 209

13 Migrant Mother 235

14 On the Road: The Dust Bowl 244

15 On the Road: The South 259

16 An American Exodus 279

17 Dorothea and Roy 287

Pt. IV Wartime 1939-1945

Scene 4 303

18 Family Stress 305

19 Defiant War Photography: The Japanese Internment 314

20 Unruly War Photography: The Office of War Information and Defense Workers 327

Pt. V Independent Photographer 1945-1965

Scene 5 343

21 Surviving in the Cold 345

22 Working for Life 366

23 Diplomat's Wife 382

24 To a Cabin 401

25 Photographer of Democracy 423

Lange's Photograph Captions 431

Acknowledgments 435

Note on Photographs and Quotations 437

Notes 439

Photograph Sources 519

Index 523

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 15, 2012

    Excellent biography.

    A well written biography of Lange and her times.

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