A Life Beyond Limits
DOROTHEA LANGE
A Life Beyond Limits
By Linda Gordon
Migrant Mother has a serendipitous history, as Linda Gordon makes clear in “Dorothea Lange,” an absorbing, exhaustively researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in the rise of modern photojournalism. “I didn’t know a mule from a tractor,” Lange admitted.
Lange’s territory included all of California, which she covered by automobile. Lange drove on for 20 miles before something pulled her back. In the Nipomo camp, Lange met Florence Thompson, 32, the mother of 11 children, five born out of wedlock. Lange took a half-dozen photos, putting Thompson and her children in different poses. Though Gordon doesn’t mention it, Lange may have decided to use only three of the children to avoid the public perception of “Okies” as irresponsible “white trash.”
Gordon, who teaches history is a leading scholar of gender and family in modern American life. Not surprisingly, she spends a fair amount of space on Lange’s personal life and role as a female photographer in a male-dominated profession. In San Francisco, where Lange moved in 1918, she created a portrait studio successful beyond her dreams.
Early in the Depression, Lange had tried but failed to photograph the labor protests that shook San Francisco. Lange’s talent lay elsewhere.
Gordon is more in tune with the politics of Paul Taylor, who believed in organized protest to redress economic grievances, than she is with Lange’s more passive approach. A portrait photographer at heart, Lange stressed the inner emotions of those facing injustice and deprivation. “Her documentary photography was portrait photography,” Gordon says. Lange saw America as a worthy work in progress, incomplete and capable of better. Gordon’s elegant biography is testament to Lange’s gift for challenging her country to open its eyes. You could have the book here.
READ ELSE BOOKs:
