Cox Ch. Dorothea Lange

Aperture, 1987. — 100 p. — (Aperture Masters of Photography. Number Five)Dorothea Lange is best known tor the photographs she made in the 1930s when she worked tor the Farm Security Administration. It was during this time that she photographed such powerful images as Migrant Mother. From her documentation of California's migratory workers who fled dust and drought on the Great Plains and Southwest to seek a new life in the West, to her telling images of the desperate condition of the sharecroppers of the South, she sought to portray the social turmoil and injustice caused by the economic upheaval of the time.This volume of the Masters of Photography series presents forty-two 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 faces." It is no wonder that Edward Steichcn once called her the greatest documentary photographer in the United States.In an introductory essay, Christopher Cox provides an account of the artist's lite and her enduring contribution.