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Dorothea Lange: Photographs Of A Lifetime: An Aperture Monograph
Reprinted for the first time, this is the most comprehensive collection of the photographer's work ever published. It includes portraits from her early years as a fashionable studio photographer as well as classic images that established her as the preeminent documentary artist of her time. “ Dorothea Photographs of a Lifetime captures--like all of her work--the extraordinary in the commonplace, with rare candor, compassion, and dignity.”
-- Elle magazine.
-- Elle magazine.
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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About the author
Robert Coles
244 books77 followersChild psychiatrist, author, Harvard professor.
Robert Coles is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School, a research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services, and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard College.
Robert Coles is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School, a research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services, and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard College.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 8, 2020
Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime: An Aperture Monograph
Their roots were all torn out. The only background they had was a background of utter poverty. It's very hard to photograph a proud man against a background like that, because it doesn't show what he's proud about. I had to get my camera to register the things about those people that were more important than how poor they were -- their pride, their strength, their spirit -- by Dorothea Lange
I recently reviewed two different photography books from the local library on the two most famous American photographers of the Depression Era and quite possibly of the 20th century: Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. They are very different photographers to be sure but they were both tonal specialists. Mostly though I felt deeply about what the photographs represented.
This book (in hardcover) showcases Dorothea Lange's (1895 - 1965) best photos and one quickly sees the genius in her portraitures of everyday people. Although there is not much, Lange also writes insightful captions for many of the photos.
Both of my parents were born at the outset of the Great Depression and while they did not suffer like the Okies since my grandfathers stayed employed -- one grandfather was a school teacher and another a plumber -- I can identify with the subjects of the photos. It seems odd to feel nostalgia for an era decades before I came on the scene -- but that's what a great photographer can do.
Many of Lange's famous photos came from her time working for the Farm Security Administration Photography Project. The Migrant Mother photo in this volume is perhaps the most iconic American photograph. PBS even ran an entire special on Florence Owens Thompson, the subject of the photo.
Wrinkles, gaunt faces, unkempt hair, dirty fingernails, nursing babies, dusty roads and fields, run down shacks, crossroad stores, farms, turpentine men, cotton pickers, ex-slaves, churches, homeless, migrant tents, tenant famers, factory workers, rocking chairs on porches, cripples. These are her subjects.
Specifically there is a haunting 1938 picture of a middle-aged woman staring out of a car window during a funeral cortege in a California town. There is one of an Alabaman woman, an ex-slave, holding tightly onto her walking stick while looking at a dilapidated shack -- presumably hers. There is a photo of turpentine dippers in Georgia. There is a portraiture entitled Ditched, Stalled, and Stranded from 1935 in Joaquin Valley. The man even looks like Henry Fonda's character in The Grapes of Wrath. There is another entitled Family on the Road, Midwest. A family from Oklahoma is headed to the Midwest seeking jobs -- their car is piled with mattresses and furniture. There is one taken of a woman covering her face while smoking a cigarette -- Lange's notes say the woman was contemplating her bad troubles over the weekend.
5 stars. I loved this book. Lange was a great storyteller in her own way -- a picture is worth a thousand words and all that.
Their roots were all torn out. The only background they had was a background of utter poverty. It's very hard to photograph a proud man against a background like that, because it doesn't show what he's proud about. I had to get my camera to register the things about those people that were more important than how poor they were -- their pride, their strength, their spirit -- by Dorothea Lange
I recently reviewed two different photography books from the local library on the two most famous American photographers of the Depression Era and quite possibly of the 20th century: Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. They are very different photographers to be sure but they were both tonal specialists. Mostly though I felt deeply about what the photographs represented.
This book (in hardcover) showcases Dorothea Lange's (1895 - 1965) best photos and one quickly sees the genius in her portraitures of everyday people. Although there is not much, Lange also writes insightful captions for many of the photos.
Both of my parents were born at the outset of the Great Depression and while they did not suffer like the Okies since my grandfathers stayed employed -- one grandfather was a school teacher and another a plumber -- I can identify with the subjects of the photos. It seems odd to feel nostalgia for an era decades before I came on the scene -- but that's what a great photographer can do.
Many of Lange's famous photos came from her time working for the Farm Security Administration Photography Project. The Migrant Mother photo in this volume is perhaps the most iconic American photograph. PBS even ran an entire special on Florence Owens Thompson, the subject of the photo.
Wrinkles, gaunt faces, unkempt hair, dirty fingernails, nursing babies, dusty roads and fields, run down shacks, crossroad stores, farms, turpentine men, cotton pickers, ex-slaves, churches, homeless, migrant tents, tenant famers, factory workers, rocking chairs on porches, cripples. These are her subjects.
Specifically there is a haunting 1938 picture of a middle-aged woman staring out of a car window during a funeral cortege in a California town. There is one of an Alabaman woman, an ex-slave, holding tightly onto her walking stick while looking at a dilapidated shack -- presumably hers. There is a photo of turpentine dippers in Georgia. There is a portraiture entitled Ditched, Stalled, and Stranded from 1935 in Joaquin Valley. The man even looks like Henry Fonda's character in The Grapes of Wrath. There is another entitled Family on the Road, Midwest. A family from Oklahoma is headed to the Midwest seeking jobs -- their car is piled with mattresses and furniture. There is one taken of a woman covering her face while smoking a cigarette -- Lange's notes say the woman was contemplating her bad troubles over the weekend.
5 stars. I loved this book. Lange was a great storyteller in her own way -- a picture is worth a thousand words and all that.
June 14, 2011
I saw Dorothea Lange's work at the Getty, years and years ago - before I knew how to crop a photo - she blew my mind.
This book shows her photographs huge - and unfettered - with her words. It's lovely
This book shows her photographs huge - and unfettered - with her words. It's lovely
Read
March 14, 2022DOROTHEA LANGE: A LIFE BEYOND LIMITS
Quotes Pt 2
“The feeling that she could not be ‘serious’ signaled that she was already imagining a new photography she wanted to do, something more challenging, something transcendent in relation to what she had already done. She blamed herself for not doing it, denying that what held her back was lack of time. Self-censure was a regular Lange refrain, one that had become more frequent, ironically, as her achievement grew.”
“But for such a visual-minded person, the images from her window disturbed her. ‘The discrepancy between what I was working on…and what was going on up the street was more than I could assimilate.”
“”I was not free when I was trying to photograph those things which were not mine.’ Freedom required being true to your nature, and this meant feeling photography as a calling, not just a business. ‘And I then decided that when I went back to the city I would only photograph the people that my life touched.’”
“She had been apprehensive that her method was too slow for capturing something important, because she couldn’t tell the subjects to hold still—‘You know there are moments such as these when…you just hope you will have enough time to get it organized in a fraction of a second on that tiny piece of sensitive film.’—but she was transfixed by her results.”
“’I can only say I knew I was looking at something…Sometimes you have an inner sense that you have encompassed the thing…You know then that you are not taking anything away from anyone, their privacy, their dignity, their wholeness.’”
“Lange’s recollection exaggerated the suddenness of this, her first great photograph and her second epiphany, as memory often congeals around particular moments or images. A near mishap further emphasizes its accidental quality: she accidentally left the exposed film in the magazine holder of her Graflex, giving it to her assistant Roger Sturtevant to reload. Luckily, he reached inside it while in the darkroom, found the neglected film, and developed it.
This narrative of the accidental White Angel photograph, then picked up by others writing about Lange, implies a sudden leap—or fall—into what becomes documentary photography.”
“Paul taught Dorothea how to think critically and systematically about society, economy, and the environment. Dorothea taught Paul to see more acutely the human emotional and aesthetic experience of the political economy he studied.”
“His incessant travel was both a cause and an effect of their friction, signaling both a desire to escape and a denial of his pain and humiliation. This denial, of anger but probably of longings, too, was so effective that falling for Dorothea caught him completely by surprise.”
“New love is more like a weed than a cultivated flower; it can sprout overnight, even in poor soil. Neither Paul nor Dorothea thought they were open to, let alone looking for, a new relationship when they met, never mind a love that would yield a thirty-year partnership in life and work. But their naturally good chemistry and their much-suppressed emotional longings were fertilized by a feeling for social justice. For Paul this had grown steadily over a decade; for Dorothea it arose from the nation’s crisis.”
“They fell in love by watching each other work.”
“Paul loved her madly. There is more evidence of his feelings than of hers because his letters to her have survived. His passion shows all the more clearly because his words reveal at the same time his formal, somewhat pompous way of speaking, intermittently entering and leaving the realm of the emotional.”
“Dorothea my dear:
If I needed something to make me realize the strength of the ties which draw me to you—this trip seems in a fair way to prove it. Why do I love you? For your complete honesty and integrity. For the clarity with which you see people…For the courage with which you face them. For the breadth and depth of your human understanding. For the fineness of your sympathy, which is extended in the same quality to all human beings low and high. (Any exceptions are based upon a sound discrimination). For your conception of your own work—your superb, and the standards of the excellence and supreme artistry which you can achieve and the relation of your own work to the scientific and social objectives to which it can contribute. For the unalloyed fineness of your personal relations to those with whom you are most intimate…For your gaiety, delicious sense of humor—perspective on one’s deepest aspirations and foibles alike…”
“Both Dorothea and Paul treated their ex-spouses with sensitivity and caring, and neither criticized their exes in front of their children.”
“She placed objects, art, and photographs sparingly and changed them frequently. Her purpose was to encourage looking and noticing, not to allow interiors to become too customary. Her rule was, never have anything in your house that you don’t truly like to look at. You only need one set of dishes, she insisted; the best should be used every day.”
“Her impulse for simplicity was neither Spartan nor withholding. She loved to shop, and she preferred the interesting to be fashionable. She liked to stand out.”
“I found a little office, tucked away, in a hot, muggy early summer, where nobody especially knew exactly what he was going to do. And this is no criticism because you walked into an atmosphere of a very special kind of freedom. That’s the thing that is almost impossible to duplicate or find. Roy Stryker was a man with a hospitable mind. You know there is a word elan. There was something that I would understand better myself if it applied to one of us only. But it didn’t. It caught. And it caught like it was contagious. What you were doing was important. You were important. Not in the way in an organizational chart, not that way at all. You had a responsibility. Not to those people in the office, but in general. As a person expands when he has an important thing to do. When you were out in the field you found your way, but never like a big-shot photographer, not as the big magazine boys do it now. We found our way in, slid in on the edges. The people who are garrulous and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree, is the fellow that you’d better find out why. So often it’s just sticking around, not swooping in and swooping out in a cloud of dust; sitting down on the ground with people, letting the children look at your camera with their fingers on the lens, and you let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you’re very apt to receive it. I don’t mean to say that I did that all the time, but I have done it, and I have asked for a drink of water and taken a long time to drink it, and I have told everything about myself long before I asked any question. ‘What are you doing here?’ they’d say. ‘What do you want to take pictures of us for?’ I’ve taken a long time to explain, and as truthfully as I could. They knew that you are telling the truth. Not that you could ever promise them anything, but it meant a lot that the government in Washington was aware enough to even send you out.”
“Photographers were angriest about how Stryker killed photographs—sometimes because they had objectionable subject matter, but when Rothstein photographed in a whorehouse or Shahn captured police brutality on film, but mostly because Stryker consisted them of poor quality. At first he would clip the negatives he judged weak or flawed, then later punched holes in them; some have estimated—wildly, I think—that he killed as many as 100,000. Stryker defended this triage as essential because making prints was the lab’s most time consuming work, but the photographers failed to understand why he could not put the inferior negatives aside without ruining them. Gordon Parks considered Stryker’s hole-punching “barbaric,” “because there is no way of telling, no way, what photographs would come alive when.” It took years of pressure from the photographers to get him to quit his practice, and the fact that Parks, who didn’t arrive until 1942, complained suggests that Stryker may never have quit entirely (although it is possible that Parks knew about the practice from seeing old negatives).
In these gripes we can hear the artists’ desire for control over their work. Despite their social-movement consciousness, they also wanted to control their photography. Most of them would have preferred to do their own developing and printing, and Lange in particular tried to wangle a way to do this. She complained bitterly about not being able to see prints soon after they were made, so that she lost the opportunity to appraise what she had done and to make improvements immediately. She hated the decontextualization of her work, notably the fact that her captions were never published or exhibited. It galled them to have their work purged; Stryker’s censorship alienated their labor, they felt, and stole from them some of the satisfaction of working for social justice.”
“Always a portrait photographer, Lange turned toward the poor the same eye, the same flattering angles and easy-to-read composition she had previously directed toward the rich. Her most famous pictures—a tiny proportion of her photography—were composed by massing simple forms—triangles, ovals—and fell comfortably inside conventional, vernacular, Christian visual culture. Many of her photographs, by contrast, display considerably more complexity of composition. But not even the similar photographs reduce tensions or smooth contradictions. Her attraction to human personality and complexity did not subside when her subjects were poor. Where she once catered to the rich by traveling to their homes to photograph, now she went to lean-tos and shacks.”
“She included tiny farmworkers, mules, and tractors in these field shots not only as a gauge by which to measure size but also to show the impersonality of these enterprises where workers never met the boss and did not know many of their coworkers.”
“Lange’s method was not only a method but a democratic way of seeing. Like all documentary photographers of her time, she shared the popular-front aesthetic known as social realism. Celebrating the “common man,” she represented the people who worked the land as model citizens. The most wretched sharecroppers and homeless migrants were salt-of-the-earth citizens. They worked hard, deserved respect, and merited the rights and power of a citizen in a democracy. Moreover, these common folk had complexity and gravitas equal to that of the rich and the educated. In Arthur Miller’s words of this era, “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.’”
“The standard adjective applied to her subjects is dignified, but at least equally compelling is the fact that they are interesting. Lange’s desperate farmworkers are simultaneously victimized and vibrant; often sexy—both women and men—vigorous, animated, or contemplative. They may be depressed, but not only depressed. Her subjects sing, play banjos and guitars, dance. The children are excited and curious, the grown-ups laugh.”
“As in San Francisco in 1934, Lange’s attempts to document social conflict consistently failed. Her photographs of strikes lacked intensity and provided little information. Her problem was partly inherent in war photography, summarized by Robert Capa as, “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”—it was dangerous to do so, neither side trusted her, and she did not move quickly. For strikers, the very existence of photographs was dangerous and could lead, at the least, to being blacklisted out of work. Strike photographs by her more adventurous young friend Otto Hagel were not much better. Lange’s photographic temperament, however, suggests that she had no affinity for overt conflict, let alone violence. She raged at the growers, of course: The inequities were so great, the methods used against the workers so violent and unfair, the power concentrated in the hands of the growers so overwhelming. Her photographs, however, wept more than they raged.”
Quotes Pt 2
“The feeling that she could not be ‘serious’ signaled that she was already imagining a new photography she wanted to do, something more challenging, something transcendent in relation to what she had already done. She blamed herself for not doing it, denying that what held her back was lack of time. Self-censure was a regular Lange refrain, one that had become more frequent, ironically, as her achievement grew.”
“But for such a visual-minded person, the images from her window disturbed her. ‘The discrepancy between what I was working on…and what was going on up the street was more than I could assimilate.”
“”I was not free when I was trying to photograph those things which were not mine.’ Freedom required being true to your nature, and this meant feeling photography as a calling, not just a business. ‘And I then decided that when I went back to the city I would only photograph the people that my life touched.’”
“She had been apprehensive that her method was too slow for capturing something important, because she couldn’t tell the subjects to hold still—‘You know there are moments such as these when…you just hope you will have enough time to get it organized in a fraction of a second on that tiny piece of sensitive film.’—but she was transfixed by her results.”
“’I can only say I knew I was looking at something…Sometimes you have an inner sense that you have encompassed the thing…You know then that you are not taking anything away from anyone, their privacy, their dignity, their wholeness.’”
“Lange’s recollection exaggerated the suddenness of this, her first great photograph and her second epiphany, as memory often congeals around particular moments or images. A near mishap further emphasizes its accidental quality: she accidentally left the exposed film in the magazine holder of her Graflex, giving it to her assistant Roger Sturtevant to reload. Luckily, he reached inside it while in the darkroom, found the neglected film, and developed it.
This narrative of the accidental White Angel photograph, then picked up by others writing about Lange, implies a sudden leap—or fall—into what becomes documentary photography.”
“Paul taught Dorothea how to think critically and systematically about society, economy, and the environment. Dorothea taught Paul to see more acutely the human emotional and aesthetic experience of the political economy he studied.”
“His incessant travel was both a cause and an effect of their friction, signaling both a desire to escape and a denial of his pain and humiliation. This denial, of anger but probably of longings, too, was so effective that falling for Dorothea caught him completely by surprise.”
“New love is more like a weed than a cultivated flower; it can sprout overnight, even in poor soil. Neither Paul nor Dorothea thought they were open to, let alone looking for, a new relationship when they met, never mind a love that would yield a thirty-year partnership in life and work. But their naturally good chemistry and their much-suppressed emotional longings were fertilized by a feeling for social justice. For Paul this had grown steadily over a decade; for Dorothea it arose from the nation’s crisis.”
“They fell in love by watching each other work.”
“Paul loved her madly. There is more evidence of his feelings than of hers because his letters to her have survived. His passion shows all the more clearly because his words reveal at the same time his formal, somewhat pompous way of speaking, intermittently entering and leaving the realm of the emotional.”
“Dorothea my dear:
If I needed something to make me realize the strength of the ties which draw me to you—this trip seems in a fair way to prove it. Why do I love you? For your complete honesty and integrity. For the clarity with which you see people…For the courage with which you face them. For the breadth and depth of your human understanding. For the fineness of your sympathy, which is extended in the same quality to all human beings low and high. (Any exceptions are based upon a sound discrimination). For your conception of your own work—your superb, and the standards of the excellence and supreme artistry which you can achieve and the relation of your own work to the scientific and social objectives to which it can contribute. For the unalloyed fineness of your personal relations to those with whom you are most intimate…For your gaiety, delicious sense of humor—perspective on one’s deepest aspirations and foibles alike…”
“Both Dorothea and Paul treated their ex-spouses with sensitivity and caring, and neither criticized their exes in front of their children.”
“She placed objects, art, and photographs sparingly and changed them frequently. Her purpose was to encourage looking and noticing, not to allow interiors to become too customary. Her rule was, never have anything in your house that you don’t truly like to look at. You only need one set of dishes, she insisted; the best should be used every day.”
“Her impulse for simplicity was neither Spartan nor withholding. She loved to shop, and she preferred the interesting to be fashionable. She liked to stand out.”
“I found a little office, tucked away, in a hot, muggy early summer, where nobody especially knew exactly what he was going to do. And this is no criticism because you walked into an atmosphere of a very special kind of freedom. That’s the thing that is almost impossible to duplicate or find. Roy Stryker was a man with a hospitable mind. You know there is a word elan. There was something that I would understand better myself if it applied to one of us only. But it didn’t. It caught. And it caught like it was contagious. What you were doing was important. You were important. Not in the way in an organizational chart, not that way at all. You had a responsibility. Not to those people in the office, but in general. As a person expands when he has an important thing to do. When you were out in the field you found your way, but never like a big-shot photographer, not as the big magazine boys do it now. We found our way in, slid in on the edges. The people who are garrulous and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree, is the fellow that you’d better find out why. So often it’s just sticking around, not swooping in and swooping out in a cloud of dust; sitting down on the ground with people, letting the children look at your camera with their fingers on the lens, and you let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you’re very apt to receive it. I don’t mean to say that I did that all the time, but I have done it, and I have asked for a drink of water and taken a long time to drink it, and I have told everything about myself long before I asked any question. ‘What are you doing here?’ they’d say. ‘What do you want to take pictures of us for?’ I’ve taken a long time to explain, and as truthfully as I could. They knew that you are telling the truth. Not that you could ever promise them anything, but it meant a lot that the government in Washington was aware enough to even send you out.”
“Photographers were angriest about how Stryker killed photographs—sometimes because they had objectionable subject matter, but when Rothstein photographed in a whorehouse or Shahn captured police brutality on film, but mostly because Stryker consisted them of poor quality. At first he would clip the negatives he judged weak or flawed, then later punched holes in them; some have estimated—wildly, I think—that he killed as many as 100,000. Stryker defended this triage as essential because making prints was the lab’s most time consuming work, but the photographers failed to understand why he could not put the inferior negatives aside without ruining them. Gordon Parks considered Stryker’s hole-punching “barbaric,” “because there is no way of telling, no way, what photographs would come alive when.” It took years of pressure from the photographers to get him to quit his practice, and the fact that Parks, who didn’t arrive until 1942, complained suggests that Stryker may never have quit entirely (although it is possible that Parks knew about the practice from seeing old negatives).
In these gripes we can hear the artists’ desire for control over their work. Despite their social-movement consciousness, they also wanted to control their photography. Most of them would have preferred to do their own developing and printing, and Lange in particular tried to wangle a way to do this. She complained bitterly about not being able to see prints soon after they were made, so that she lost the opportunity to appraise what she had done and to make improvements immediately. She hated the decontextualization of her work, notably the fact that her captions were never published or exhibited. It galled them to have their work purged; Stryker’s censorship alienated their labor, they felt, and stole from them some of the satisfaction of working for social justice.”
“Always a portrait photographer, Lange turned toward the poor the same eye, the same flattering angles and easy-to-read composition she had previously directed toward the rich. Her most famous pictures—a tiny proportion of her photography—were composed by massing simple forms—triangles, ovals—and fell comfortably inside conventional, vernacular, Christian visual culture. Many of her photographs, by contrast, display considerably more complexity of composition. But not even the similar photographs reduce tensions or smooth contradictions. Her attraction to human personality and complexity did not subside when her subjects were poor. Where she once catered to the rich by traveling to their homes to photograph, now she went to lean-tos and shacks.”
“She included tiny farmworkers, mules, and tractors in these field shots not only as a gauge by which to measure size but also to show the impersonality of these enterprises where workers never met the boss and did not know many of their coworkers.”
“Lange’s method was not only a method but a democratic way of seeing. Like all documentary photographers of her time, she shared the popular-front aesthetic known as social realism. Celebrating the “common man,” she represented the people who worked the land as model citizens. The most wretched sharecroppers and homeless migrants were salt-of-the-earth citizens. They worked hard, deserved respect, and merited the rights and power of a citizen in a democracy. Moreover, these common folk had complexity and gravitas equal to that of the rich and the educated. In Arthur Miller’s words of this era, “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.’”
“The standard adjective applied to her subjects is dignified, but at least equally compelling is the fact that they are interesting. Lange’s desperate farmworkers are simultaneously victimized and vibrant; often sexy—both women and men—vigorous, animated, or contemplative. They may be depressed, but not only depressed. Her subjects sing, play banjos and guitars, dance. The children are excited and curious, the grown-ups laugh.”
“As in San Francisco in 1934, Lange’s attempts to document social conflict consistently failed. Her photographs of strikes lacked intensity and provided little information. Her problem was partly inherent in war photography, summarized by Robert Capa as, “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”—it was dangerous to do so, neither side trusted her, and she did not move quickly. For strikers, the very existence of photographs was dangerous and could lead, at the least, to being blacklisted out of work. Strike photographs by her more adventurous young friend Otto Hagel were not much better. Lange’s photographic temperament, however, suggests that she had no affinity for overt conflict, let alone violence. She raged at the growers, of course: The inequities were so great, the methods used against the workers so violent and unfair, the power concentrated in the hands of the growers so overwhelming. Her photographs, however, wept more than they raged.”
June 16, 2025
'The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.'
Impact
Dorothea Lange's body of work is a powerful example of how a photojournalist can make a meaningful impact on the world. It's clear that she aimed to capture more than just a record of events—she was driven by a deeper purpose.
"A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph per se, it carries with it another thing, a quality that the artist responds to."
That idea runs through all her work. Her photographs don’t just show people’s lives—they create a sense of connection between the viewer and the subject.
The Power of Midtones
One thing that really struck me was her use of midtones. She didn’t rely on high contrast or dramatic lighting. Instead, her images are filled with rich midtones that add softness and depth to skin, clothing, and the world around her subjects. These midtones give her photographs a quiet, natural, and deeply human feel. Her highlights are carefully controlled—never too bright—and her shadows are deep but never harsh. You can still see the details, which helps preserve both the emotion and the story. She wasn’t interested in making things look impressive just for the sake of it.
"Everything is propaganda for what you believe in. I don't see that it could be otherwise."
Her attention to tone and detail reflects that belief. She used photography to advocate for what she believed in—ordinary people and the dignity in their everyday struggles.
Photography as a Way of Seeing
Lange also believed in the power of photography to change how we see the world. Her work does exactly that. It encourages us to look more closely, to notice quiet strength in others, and to pay attention to stories that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Favorite Projects:
- The Great Depression
- The Evacuation
Impact
Dorothea Lange's body of work is a powerful example of how a photojournalist can make a meaningful impact on the world. It's clear that she aimed to capture more than just a record of events—she was driven by a deeper purpose.
"A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph per se, it carries with it another thing, a quality that the artist responds to."
That idea runs through all her work. Her photographs don’t just show people’s lives—they create a sense of connection between the viewer and the subject.
The Power of Midtones
One thing that really struck me was her use of midtones. She didn’t rely on high contrast or dramatic lighting. Instead, her images are filled with rich midtones that add softness and depth to skin, clothing, and the world around her subjects. These midtones give her photographs a quiet, natural, and deeply human feel. Her highlights are carefully controlled—never too bright—and her shadows are deep but never harsh. You can still see the details, which helps preserve both the emotion and the story. She wasn’t interested in making things look impressive just for the sake of it.
"Everything is propaganda for what you believe in. I don't see that it could be otherwise."
Her attention to tone and detail reflects that belief. She used photography to advocate for what she believed in—ordinary people and the dignity in their everyday struggles.
Photography as a Way of Seeing
Lange also believed in the power of photography to change how we see the world. Her work does exactly that. It encourages us to look more closely, to notice quiet strength in others, and to pay attention to stories that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Favorite Projects:
- The Great Depression
- The Evacuation
May 31, 2021
AUTHOR Lange, Dorothea and Coles, Robert
TITLE Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime
DATE READ 05/30/21
RATING 5/A
FIRST SENTENCE You put your camera around your neck in the morning along w/ putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
GENRE/ PUB DATE/FORMAT/LENGTH Non Fiction / 1982/library/ 182 pgs
SERIES/STAND-ALONE SA
CHALLENGE Good Reads 2020 Reading Goal 55/120
GROUP READ
TIME/PLACE CA and various/1930's - 1960's
CHARACTERS Dorothea Lange / Photojournalist
COMMENTS After reading the fictional account of Dorothea Lange in The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik I was fascinated by her and wanted to learn more. This was a book w/ a brief bio about her life and work and also many of her iconic photos. Excellent!
TITLE Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime
DATE READ 05/30/21
RATING 5/A
FIRST SENTENCE You put your camera around your neck in the morning along w/ putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
GENRE/ PUB DATE/FORMAT/LENGTH Non Fiction / 1982/library/ 182 pgs
SERIES/STAND-ALONE SA
CHALLENGE Good Reads 2020 Reading Goal 55/120
GROUP READ
TIME/PLACE CA and various/1930's - 1960's
CHARACTERS Dorothea Lange / Photojournalist
COMMENTS After reading the fictional account of Dorothea Lange in The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik I was fascinated by her and wanted to learn more. This was a book w/ a brief bio about her life and work and also many of her iconic photos. Excellent!
January 22, 2021
A beautiful coffee table book collection of Lange's photographs, mostly those of the depression/dust bowl years, enhanced by her own written commentary. I enjoyed this book as a prelude to reading Learning to See by Elise Hooper.
September 20, 2020
Amazing photos and really interesting to learn about how much Lange learned about her subjects. For her, taking the photo was the best part. She left developing and printing to others.
June 13, 2021
It is Worth to spend some hours and read this book. Contemporary social, political history of u.s and art (D. Lange and her way of photography history. This book was better than I initially thought.
June 30, 2021
"... but the fellow who's hiding behind a tree, and hoping you don't see him, is the fellow you'd better find out about."
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