Description
One photograph defined the Depression. This is the woman behind it — finally, fully told. A worried mother in a pea-pickers’ camp — Dorothea Lange’s image became the Great Depression’s defining picture. Linda Gordon’s 2009 biography — winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize — is the first full life of one of America’s greatest documentary photographers.
Gordon traces Lange from a polio-marked childhood to her 1920s San Francisco portrait studio, into the Farm Security Administration fieldwork that made her famous: migrant workers, Dust Bowl refugees, and — in images the government long suppressed — Japanese Americans forced into wartime internment camps.
Compassionate, rigorous, and richly illustrated by the story it tells, this reveals an artist who believed a camera could be an instrument of justice — essential for photography lovers, history readers, and anyone moved by images powerful enough to change minds and policy.
One photograph — a worried mother holding her children in a pea-pickers’ camp — became the defining image of the Great Depression. Behind it stood Dorothea Lange, one of America’s greatest documentary photographers. Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, published in 2009, is the first full biography of this remarkable woman, and it won both the Bancroft Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography.
Gordon, a noted historian, traces Lange’s journey from a childhood marked by polio to the San Francisco portrait studio she ran in the 1920s, and into the field work for the Farm Security Administration that made her famous. Lange photographed migrant workers, Dust Bowl refugees, and — in images the government long suppressed — Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II.
Compassionate, rigorous, and richly illustrated by the story it tells, this biography reveals an artist who believed a camera could be an instrument of justice. Essential for photography lovers, history readers, and anyone moved by the power of images to change minds.
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