ABSTRACT
This book synthesizes secondary scholarship and archival research. It relies heavily upon Milton Meltzer’s Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978) and Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange, A Life Beyond Limits (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009). The latter situates Lange within the context of women’s lives and the New Deal and is enriched by Gordon’s deep knowledge of twentieth century politics and activist efforts to reshape the state. Lange gave a life history to the University of California, which provides much detail about her early life, her move to California, and her work with the New Deal through to her last years. Dorothea Lange: The Making of a Documentary Photographer, conducted by Suzanne Riess in 1960-1961, Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1968, available at https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/lange_dorothea__w.pdf">https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/lange_dorothea__w.pdf. Another interview by the Smithsonian offers slightly different perspectives. Reading them against one another is fertile. Dorothea Lange, 1964 May 22. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-dorothea-lange-11757">https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-dorothea-lange-11757. Quotations typically come from the two biographies, Lange’s oral histories, her Field Notes at the Oakland Museum, and her An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939), co-authored with Paul Taylor.
