From Library Journal
This collection of 100 stark pieces of Lange's work captures the lives of the hard-pressed from dustbowl farmers right out of The Grapes of Wrath to photos of Ireland and Egypt. The text also incorporates an essay by Harvard psychiatrist and social investigator Coles. Many of the photos are accompanied by excerpts from Lange's writings (LJ 12/1/82).Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
The most comprehensive collection of the photographer's work ever published.

Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime begins with her portraits from the early years, when she was a fashionable studio photographer, and moves into the classic images that established Lange as the preeminent documentary artist of her time: the Depression bread lines and demonstrations, the blighted farms, the migrating farm families, and the makeshift, desolate tent camps. The book concludes with her photographs from the final years, when Lange traveled the globe, finally turning the lens on her children and grandchildren and the familiar objects of her daily life.

In a penetrating critical biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles offers an incisive study of Lange's life and work.


About the Author
Robert Coles, editor of DoubleTake, has published articles in such publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The American Poetry Review.

ANNOTATION

"The array of images made over her lifetime are given a most elegant and appropriate presentation..." -- The Washington Post

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Throughout her long working life, Dorothea Lange was an exceptional, often brilliant photographer. In the historic decade of the thirties, she was more - a pioneer, a shaper of the medium, and a motivator of the national conscience. Lange's direct, compelling studies of people forced from the land are both a faithful chronicle and a landmark of twentieth-century photography. In her later years, she brought this unique vision to rural communities as diverse as the Mormons of Utah, the countryfolk of Ireland, the fellaheen of Egypt. Dorothea Lange: Photographer of a Lifetime is the most comprehensive collection of the artist's work ever to be published. It begins with portraits from her early years when she was San Francisco's most fashionable studio photographer, and it concludes with images from her final years, when Lange traveled the globe, then, finally, turned her lens toward children and grandchildren, home, and the familiar objects and events of her daily life. In a penetrating critical biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles offers an incisive study of Lange's life and work. As one of the great contemporary social investigators, Coles explores in Lange's methods and accomplishments those qualities that enable the "artist-observer" to satisfy the objectivity expected of chroniclers and the subjective emotional involvement of the artist's personal vision. Accompanying the photographs are Lange's own reminiscences and observations, collected from her writings and from interviews made shortly before her death in 1965.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal