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Rating: 
Summary: Dignity captured.
Review: A wonderful book of eighty-five, beautifully printed, Dorothea Lange photos. I think the best ones are forty-seven from the thirties when Lange was part of a small group of photographers employed by the Government to record the plight of the rural poor. Their output (now in the Library of Congress and accessible to all) was the most complete photographic record of a nation ever undertaken. Lange and Walker Evans were, depending on your point of view, the most talented of this group and you can see why by looking at her photos in this book. Keith Davis says in the introduction... "Her photographs are at once bluntly factual and deeply sympathetic. While Lange recorded innumerable scenes of destitution, she consistently evoked the resilience, faith and determination of her subjects". I think her point-of-view comes across in all the work shown in this book. After the thirties the remaining photos cover her work up to 1958.All the photos have dated captions and many have background information about what is being shown plus the thoughts of Lange and her subjects. The back of the book has a chronology, bibliography and print source. This is a lovely record of her photographic work but if you want to know more, these two books take a comprehensive look at her life, 'Dorothea Lange: American Photographs' by Therese Heyman, Sandra Phillips and John Szakowski and 'Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime' by Robert Coles. BTW, this is the second book of American images I have reviewed in the last few days, the other one was a selection of photos taken over a number of years by British photographer Nick Waplington of a small town in New Mexico called Truth or Consequences (also the books title) but what a contrast, the Lange book has captions and other information, the photographer's thoughts, chronology, bibliography, sources while Waplington's book has none of this, not even page numbers! It raises questions (least to me) about how publishers regard their readers.
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