Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photographs are among the most iconic ever taken. Linda Gordon is a scholar of gender and family at New York University, and her new biography of Lange has been praised, with varying levels of qualification. In the New York Times, David Oshinsky writes a rave, calling the book “absorbing, exhaustively researched” and an “elegant . . . testament to Lange’s gift for challenging her country to open its eyes.” In the New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban calls it a “substantial, cradle-to-grave biography . . . best at placing [Lange] within the context of the various milieus in which she moved.” But he also thinks that on her academic ground of gender and family, Gordon is “simultaneously confident and not entirely persuasive.” Wendy Smith, in the Los Angeles Times, agrees with this criticism, writing that the book’s “considerable merits almost compensate for Gordon’s irritating tendency to view Lange through a politically correct lens. . . . Given the author’s obvious admiration for her subject, one wishes she had eschewed anachronistic agonizing over such things as ‘the inequality of the transaction’ between the ‘middle-class urbanite’ photographer and her ‘uneducated, often darker-skinned’ subjects, or the hardly astonishing fact that both Lange’s husbands left the housework to her. Applying such contemporary standards detracts from Gordon’s moving, intelligent portrait of an artist who set the standard for every socially concerned photographer who followed.”
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
Norton, 560 pp., $35.00
