Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits Details
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 BiographyLinda 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 YorkAn 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 CenturyAs 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 HomeA richly human portrait of the eminent photographer whose luminous Depression-era images had the democratizing impact of a Steinbeck novel. "Gordon's elegant biography is a testament to Lange's gift for challenging her country to open its eyes. "The material is fascinating, and [the] presentation sterling. " Read more About the Author Linda Gordon, winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is the author of The Second Coming of the KKK, Dorothea Lange and Impounded, and the coauthor of Feminism Unfinished. She is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University and lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin. Read more
Reviews
This book is absolutely fascinating and filled with a plethora of information that I didn't know. One would think that the biography of a photographer could be interesting, but this book greatly exceeds "interesting". It is way more than a biography. It is a book of the times and a book that is nearly impossible to put down. One of those books where you let the phone go to voice mail because you don't want to stop reading it! It is accompanied by a trove of photographs, but after reading it, you wish that it included nearly every photo she ever took. You will not only have great appreciation for the legacy that she left but also for the incredibly difficult times that our country and its people went through.
