Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits [Hardcover]

Linda Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 19, 2009

Winner of the 2010 Bancroft Prize and the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography: Dorothea Lange’s photographs define how we remember the Depression generation; now an evocative biography defines her creative struggles and enduring legacy.

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. 128 photos

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

[Signature]Reviewed by Kirstin DowneyHistorian 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 how Lange 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 theWashington 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).
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Review

A riveting, massively researched biography of a remarkable woman and great photographer. It's also an invaluable, cultural history of America from San Francisco's Bohemia of the 1920s to the Great Depression through WWII. Gordon tells us some amazing stories of such legendary photographers as the 'Migrant Mother,' and she also documents Lange's study of the Japanese-Americans and their oppressive internment camps. This is an absolutely fascinating study and a must read. (Patricia Bosworth, author of Diane Arbus: The Biography )

Linda Gordon, one of our greatest historians, gives us an engrossing portrait of Dorothea Lange. Every page of this magisterial biography sparkles with insight into Lange’s life, passions, photographic techniques and achievements—and into the lives of the dispossessed farmers, unemployed laborers, and incarcerated Japanese-Americans who were her greatest subjects. (George Chauncey, author of Gay New York )

An astonishing and deeply moving biography of Dorothea Lange, America’s foremost social photographer. No other account can rival this one for its engagement or for its dissection of the passions, injuries, and hopes that impelled Lange to challenge the boundaries of gender, race, and family. Linda Gordon writes about her complex subject with sophistication, frankness, and sensitivity. In the process, Gordon demonstrates yet again that she is among the most gifted and probing historians of our time. (Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century )

As Dorothea Lange’s biographer, Linda Gordon is fortunate that Lange’s private life was as complex—exceptional yet archetypal—as the history she documented in her photographs. The resulting book is superb social history rendered through a remarkable artist and personality. (Diane McWhorter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home )

Starred Review. Riveting portrait of one of America's most renowned photographers....Though largely sympathetic, Gordon doesn't shy away from depicting Lange's sometimes questionable decisions regarding her personal life. A rigorously constructed, entertaining biography. (Kirkus Reviews )

[A] masterly biography that illustrates the personal and professional struggles and achievements of a woman who was ahead of her time and who remains overshadowed by her work. (Elle )

[An] absorbing biography....Gordon's accounts...are equally perceptive and, ultimately, sympathetic. (The New Yorker )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition (October 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393057305
• ISBN-13: 978-0393057300
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #240,386 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FABULOUS!, November 3, 2009

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From the Coast of Maine (Maine) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Hardcover)

While I have not completely finished this book, I couldn't wait to write a review. Linda Gordon has done a masterful job of merging history, biography and art in a most enjoyable book. I can't put it down! Admittedly, I've always admired Dorothea Lange's photographs, but I had only an inkling as to how complicated her life was, and how entwined it was with San Francisco's Bohemian art world. Gordon's writing style is a joy and her meticulous research is obvious. Heretofore a reader has had a choice to either enjoy Lange's photographs, or tolerate what was written about her. Gordon's biography of Lange combines Lange's best photos (and many lesser know ones) with a strong, informative, thoroughly enjoyable and fast paced text. I highly recommend this book, especially in conjunction with Lange's photos and her own words in "Daring to Look: Lange's Photos and Field Notes." Thank you Ms. Gordon, a book long overdue!

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dorothea Lange: A Life Without Limits, January 4, 2010

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Mark J. Palmer "Mark J. Palmer" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Hardcover)

Review of "Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits" by Linda Gordon, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009, 536 pp.

By Mark J. Palmer, Associate Director
International Marine Mammal Project
Earth Island Institute
Berkeley, CA

Dorothea Lange's photography during the Depression defined the discipline of Documentary Photography - photography devoted to forth-rightly examining the human condition, often in the interest of righting great wrongs.

In an excellent new biography by historian Linda Gordon, Lange's experience in photographing the poor and the downtrodden was more than a bit ironic. She herself was raised in an upper class family on the East Coast. She announced her intention to take up photography as a career apparently without ever having even handled a camera, much less taken any photographs. Her career started by making portraits of wealthy San Franciscans in a studio far from dusty farms and back roads.

Lange was a hard-working self-starter, and she first attached herself to several expert photographers from whom she learned her trade. Gordon skillfully pairs Lange's career with the historic times in which she worked: Her portrait work of the elite citizens of San Francisco during the 20's is coupled with the bohemian lifestyle she adopted with many artists, including her first husband, Western painter Maynard Dixon. Her pairing with economist and agricultural reformer Paul Taylor, whom she would soon marry, when the Depression in the 30's swept away her and Dixon's art patrons and left thousands unemployed, especially migrant farm workers who were already exploited and in poverty. Her stubborn documenting of the locking away of innocent Japanese Americans during WWII hysteria, which the Army originally hired her to do and then buried the photos away from public view. (Gordon published many of these photos in 2006 in her book "Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Image of Japanese American Internment" with Gary Okihiro.) Her photography style was especially important, shunning artifice and camera tricks, as well as other artistic trends, to show people in a direct manner, as a chronicle of both adversity and human resilience.

Her photos of beautiful but pensive mothers and their families in canvas tents, broken down shacks and old cars piled with meager belongings, facing the uncertain future of farming without land of their own in bleak landscapes, are considered deeply symbolic of the economic damage done to a nation. But there was also strength shown in such photographs - the strength of the human character against the odds. Lange's photographs of migrant mothers are among the best known photographs in the world, and symbolize the 1930's and its impact.

Indeed, her expert portraits led to a change in the workings of the federal Farm Security Administration's (FSA) photography project that brought on Lange as a photographer during the Depression. The original intent of the photography project, as Gordon points out, was to document the value of the FSA and President Roosevelt's New Deal, so the agency's leaders wanted photos of new tractors, contour plowing, and other examples of things supplied farmers demonstrating the government's success in changing farming practices and helping farmers cope. But Lange's incredible and moving portraits of farm families changed the FSA photography direction, as its leaders recognized that Lange's photos of people, rather than things, had much more impact on Congress and the public.

But, as Gordon notes in her canny historical analysis, the FSA programs were largely failures, as big agriculture, the US Department of Agriculture, and Congress balked at widespread changes in practices promoted by the FSA - agricultural reform is still a distant dream, and it took Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers Union in the 1960's and 70's to marginally better the plight of migrant farmers. Lange would not live long enough to see the success of 60's empowerment movements (Lange died in 1965 of cancer), although she was supportive and appreciative of the early days of the Civil Rights Movement and the role of photography in that historic campaign.

Lange suffered several tragedies early in life - first a bout with polio that would leave her with a limp, and later the abandonment by her father, whom she would not speak about or meet ever again. (Gordon notes that Lange's mother may well have been in touch with her husband in later years and did not appear to share her daughter's anger against him - possibly, Lange's attitude was not altogether fair, albeit her hurt was genuine.) Despite these setbacks, she worked very hard indeed as wife to first Dixon and then Taylor (both of whom shared her passion against injustice), as a mother and home-maker, and as a photographer of genius. Her hard work, sometimes spending twelve hours straight in her darkroom, and extensive travel may well have led to crippling stomach ulcers that pained her. Her polio would act up again in later years, along with other diseases, including malaria and inoperable cancer. For the last twenty years of her life, she was a very sick woman, but still a working photographer and inspiration to many young people that worked with her and were taught by her.

Gordon concludes that Lange was a photographer of democracy - the upholding of the freedom and dignity of minorities, farm workers, Japanese citizens, and many others who formed the subjects of her direct field photography. She died just shortly before her one-person show opened at the New York Museum of Modern Art, but she herself chose the photographs, helped design the exhibit, and wrote the captions for the show. Her portraits of Americans were at last honored as true art.

"Dorothea Lange" reproduces a number of photographs by Lange, including both famous images and others that are virtually unknown. It is an enjoyable and solid read and a fitting tribute to one of America's finest artist with a camera.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Woman Behind the Icons, February 17, 2010

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Loves the View "Louise" (Hawaii) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Hardcover)

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 well 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.