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Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits. By Linda Gordon. (New York: Norton, 2009. xxiv, 536 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-0-393-05730-0.)
In her extraordinary Dorothea Lange, Linda Gordon treats her subject neither as icon nor celebrity but as a complex, intensely selfcritical, chronically insecure, and resdess 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, researchbased, 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,...