Dorothea Lange

...No less compassionate, Lange was more practical...

...There is a generation of Americans whose images of the Great Depression come from two sources: stories their parents told them and the photographs taken in the thirties by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Margaret BourkeWhite—familiar photographs like Lange's "Migrant Mother" and "White Angel Bread Line" that in a brief time have made such an impression on the national consciousness that it is hard for those of us who did not live through the Depression to visualize it in any other way...

...Meltzer writes that while she "saw the immediate in terms of its broader human significance," Lange's intention was "to photograph the now rather than the timeless" —in short, to produce results...

...After the Depression, Lange became involved on behalf of JapaneseAmericans detained in camps during the war, and, later still, worked on a series of "Ballet" photographs which sought "to capture the beauty of everyday actions...

...Milton Meltzer's biography of Dorothea Lange is exhaustive, particularly in its coverage of the Depression years...

...Like Walker Evans, Lange acknowledged the dignity her subjects retained whatever their hardships by virtue of their humanity...

...Speaking of her photographs of migrant workers, Lange said: "I had to get my camera to register things about them that were more important than how poor they were—their pride, their strength, their spirit...

...It is well-researched and scholarly, but like much biography, it is written in admiration and is therefore occasionally too reverent, neither critical enough in its disposition nor selective enough in biographical detail...

...Lange's photographs were prominently featured in Edward Steichen's celebrated 1955 exhibit, "The Family of Man" —the exhibit that moved Aline Saarinen, art critic for The New York Times, to wonder whether "photography had replaced painting as the greatest visual art of our time...

...Lange's most fundamental aesthetic was simplicity...

...Commonweal: 382...

...unlike the camera of Margaret Bourke-White, Lange's favored no dramatic lighting or bizarre angles to evoke sympathy...

...Yet, Lange seems to have lacked the intensity and spirituality that made Walker Evans such a suitable partner for James Agee...

...And to this end she succeeded: when her husband, Paul Taylor, illustrated his report with her photographs at a meeting of the California Rural Rehabilitation Committee, money was approved for the construction of decent government-run camps for migrant families...

...Thouh Jacob Riis had used photographs to document social conditions late in the nineteenth century, it was in the 1930s with the popularity of Henry Luce's Life Magazine and the Life and Circumstances feature in Fortune that photographers became self-conscious about their art and aware of the social changes they might effect through it...

...Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life is most successful when Meltzer uses Lange's career to explore the aesthetics of photography, the evolution of photography from craft to art, and the use of the camera as an instrument of social change...

...If, indeed, it had, Meltzer is right to attribute its preeminence to the professionalism and dedication of Dorothea Lange...