Dorothea Lange, Dorothea Lange: Aperture Masters of Photography, 2014

Dorothea Lange is best-known for the photographs she made in the 1930s when she began her pioneering work for the Farm Security Administration. From her documentation of California’s migratory workers who fled dust and drought on the Great Plains and in the Southwest to seek a new life in the West, to her telling images of the desperate conditions of the sharecroppers of the South, she sought to portray the social turmoil and injustice caused by the economic upheaval of the time. During World War II, Lange photographed Japanese Americans in internment camps, documented the struggles of women and minority workers in wartime industries at California shipyards, and captured the founding of the United Nations. She later traveled and photographed throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. In 1941, she received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

This book presents 42 of the greatest images from throughout Lange’s career, including some of her work done abroad. She possessed the ability, as she put it, to photograph “things as they are” and through this her photographs give us “more about the subjects than just the faces.” It is no wonder that Edward Steichen called her the greatest documentary photographer in the United States.

Linda Gordon contributes a new biographical essay and an image-by-image commentary to accompany a newly selected set of photographs. A professor of humanities and history at New York University, she has written at length on Dorothea Lange. Her 2009 book, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, won the Bancroft Prize. “Lange’s work defines an era of destitution and drought, and still resonates even now. This is the perfect introduction to one of the world’s greatest photojournalists.”