Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits

Abstract

In her extraordinary Dorothea Lange, Linda Gordon treats her subject neither as icon nor celebrity but as a complex, intensely self-critical, chronically insecure, and restless intellect with an exceptional, empathetic gift, who was driven to push past her own and society’s shortcomings. Gordon also performs a service by tracing the Lange-Dixon-Taylor family histories behind the Great Depression’s agricultural narrative and later inequality in home front war: massive internal migration, intractable southern racism (producing what Gordon calls Lange’s most “sensuous” photographs [p. 259]), a diverse defense work force, and the internment of American citizens. Gordon heralds a new era in photographic criticism by reuniting the photographer with her images while deftly combining engaging historical biography with inspired, research-based, contextual readings of Lange’s photographs. To read the image, we must know the photographer. Gordon thankfully reminds us that cameras do not make photographs, people do. Dorothea Lange skillfully weaves Lange’s photographic evolution through the warp and woof of domestic obligations, troubled family relationships, illness, and professional challenges, contextualized by the bohemian arts community, years spent on the road, the feudal South, war, and post–United Nations international experience. In lesser biographies of Lange, the Great Depression often looms so large that it becomes a character in its own right, obscuring the details of Lange’s personhood. Gordon is the first to discuss in fascinating depth Lange’s entire life, from her childhood in New Jersey to the postwar era. In doing so, she provides the necessary context to contemplate Lange as more than the Great Depression photographer but rather as a multidimensional humanitarian and critic, a passionate “photographer of democracy.”