Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field

In this thoughtful and meticulously researched account of Lange's career, Spirn focuses on the photographer's largely unpublished 1939 portfolio and champions it as a masterful mix of the visual and the verbal. Lange's stark photographs and accompanying field reports testify to her desire to show real Depression-era Americans—displaced and downtrodden, but carrying on nevertheless—as honestly as possible; they are published as a whole in the second section of Spirn's book. These photographs include Lange's much vaunted portraits—of sharecroppers hunched in tobacco fields and mothers with their hungry children—as well as some of her lesser known landscape photography. The reverential Spirn, a photographer herself, traces Lange's path, visiting her locations and subjects in a fascinating series of “then and now” shots, an homage to Lange, who Spirn compellingly argues deserves to take her place as “one of the most important American artists of the Twentieth Century.” (May)