Many of us have an image of what the Great Depression looked like — even if we weren't there. One reason is because of Dorothea Lange's photographs.

Linda Gordon, who wrote a book on the renowned photographer called Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, recalls one of Lange's favorite sayings: A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

Linda Gordon won for Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, published in hardcover in October 2009 by W.W. Norton. The book is a biography of the Depression-era photographer and a social history of 20th-century America—in particular San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and Japanese internment camps. Gordon previously won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (2000).

Science/Technology: Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon. Biography: Dorothea Lange by Linda Gordon. Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin.

During the Great Depression, the federal government commissioned photographers to document the impoverished and the disadvantaged, forming a stark record in black and white of the 1930s. Dorothea Lange, one of the era’s great photographers of ordinary Americans, is the subject of a magisterial biography by New York University history professor Linda Gordon.

Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits introduces us to the photographer and how she came to be the visual conscience of a nation.

Linda Gordon’s assiduously researched biography represents a monumental effort about a difficult subject.

I have no doubt Gordon faced great obstacles in writing about Lange, and her efforts at ferreting out information about her elusive subject are laudable. I only wish the text were more accessible—both Vickie Goldberg’s biography of Margaret Bourke-White and Patricia Bosworth’s of Diane Arbus come to mind. At the risk of a slighter book, I would choose more Dorothea and less history. Yes, the two were bound, but on balance, the book’s historical details shove Lange into the last place she wished to be: on the sidelines.

Gordon’s impressive ability to integrate the big picture historical aspects with the day to day life of a professional woman driven to improve democracy makes this book very discussable for groups looking for a good biography to read.

And you can even call it a picture book if you want to.

In her absorbing new biography, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (W.W. Norton & Company, 536 pages, $43.50), author Linda Gordon has created not only a nuanced portrait of her subject, but also a detailed portrait of the era in which she lived and worked.

Sean O'Hagan applauds a meticulous biography of Dorothea Lange who will forever be defined by her images of the Great Depression

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon (W.W. Norton; 536 pages; $35). The photographer behind the famous photographs.

The power and iconic status of Lange's work, specifically that produced during the Great Depression, including the iconic photograph "Migrant Mother," has often overshadowed the photographer who created it. "Dorothea Lange; a Life Beyond Limits," reveals an artist struggling with intense ambition and public responsibility on one hand and a conflicted personal life on the other.

This book is elegantly written, barely bordering on scholarly, sometimes slightly obscure, but still easily read and moves at a nice pace. The book is a chronological description of the Lange’s life, career, relationships, with snippets that glace forward to provide clarity and maintain a line of thinking to a conclusive point.

Gordon brings to this familiar story a wealth of new, and almost-new, material that deepens our understanding of Lange.

View Jeffery Brown’s interview of Linda Gordon about her recently published book Dorothea Lange, A Life Beyond Limits. Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. This segment originally aired on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on November 23, 2009

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is in fact excellent. Yes it is not contemporary fiction or a murder mystery novel but rather a historical recollection of this woman's fascinating life. What makes this book interesting is Linda Gordon's point of view as a historian and not a photographer. Gordon remains objective throughout the book (so far) and addresses the many sides of Lange's life, from her idealistic ideas about the power of photography to her troubled husband and delinquent family.

Dorothea Lang: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon

Perched precariously atop a car roof, Dorothea Lange is a study in contrasts on the cover of Linda Gordon's new book, for the photographer focusing her heavy camera was disabled from childhood polio, which left her with a twisted ankle and a weakened leg. But the determination it took to achieve the cover pose is emblematic of her career as one of the most heralded chroniclers of her time.

The list includes Daniyal Mueenuddin, Linda Gordon, and Morris Dickstein,

As Linda Gordon points out in her excellent new biography, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, the photographs Lange took of the "handsome homeless" symbolized the way the architects of the New Deal analyzed the Depression, so that widespread poverty was no longer blamed on poor people but on financial mismanagement: "The economy, not the people, needed moral reform." Lange's subjects were poor, but also disciplined, hardworking, and upright. And quite beautiful.

Linda Gordon, the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University, contributes extensive details of the volatile social and political events of the era, giving the book significant historical heft as well. Much has been written about Lange's work, but Gordon goes behind the camera with intimate details of Lange's private life and also suggests her underlying recognition of the limits of her craft. While striving for truth in her photographs, Lange held no fantasy that she or the viewer could understand the ultimately unknowable inner lives of her subjects, believing instead that her best photographs should ask questions.

Starting with Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, Linda Gordon has created what The New Times Book Review considers “an absorbing, exhaustively researched” tome, documenting “a transformative figure in the rise of modern photojournalism.” Like her contextually wide-ranging photographs, Lange’s biography traces the shifting cultural formations of American history—from the Bohemian art world of San Francisco to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during and after World War II.

Lange deserves reconsideration, and this wide-ranging biography will help. Documentary portraiture is not in vogue these days. Nor is Lange's direct empathetic gaze, which lacks today's de rigueur irony of contemporary art.

In her wonderful new biography, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, Linda Gordon suggests that there were other, deeper reasons for the attention that Lange lavished on parents and children. "Nothing in Lange's personal life," she writes, "was as fraught as her own motherhood and she lived with contradictory impulses every day."

A study in contrasts, Lange was a woman with a disability whose career required great stamina, an urban child who went to work for the Department of Agriculture. Because she did, she created a body of images that continue to interpret for us the Great Depression, and to carry some of the frightening feel of the United States circa 2009.

Gordon's "Dorothea Lange" does its subject justice.

As Linda Gordon points out in her excellent new biography, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, the photographs Lange took of the "handsome homeless" symbolized the way the architects of the New Deal analyzed the Depression, so that widespread poverty was no longer blamed on poor people but on financial mismanagement: "The economy, not the people, needed moral reform." Lange's subjects were poor, but also disciplined, hardworking, and upright. And quite beautiful.

Gordon, a social historian at NYU, whose faculty bio says that she specializes in "gender and family issues," is best at placing her subject within the context of the various milieus in which she moved. She is good on the artistic and photographic scene in New York in the Teens of the last century, where the young Lange discovered Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, and the luminaries of the Pleiades Club, and excellent on the rowdier bohemian coterie that she joined in San Francisco in the Twenties, where she met Dixon (in his customary urban uniform of Stetson and spurred cowboy boots), Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. Gordon is reliably lucid on the aesthetic and political movements of the time, though Lange herself too often remains more cipher than character in an otherwise vivid picture of her place and period.

Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photographs are among the most iconic ever taken. Linda Gordon is a scholar of gender and family at New York University, and her new biography of Lange has been praised, with varying levels of qualification.

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is an engaging read that brings many aspects of an era back to life, which we are not familiar with any longer. That is, of course, what historians do. Furthermore, the book spares us those details of photographic technique that often make biographies of photographers so tedious to read. This means that the book will also appeal to people who are not necessarily interested in photography, but might want to know more about the Great Depression, for example.

She was "a photographer of democracy, and for democracy," writes historian Linda Gordon, whose thorough biography "Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits" is at its best when detailing Lange's working methods and the distinctive qualities of the images those methods produced. The author also vividly conveys Lange's complicated, volatile personality and the way it was expressed in her clothing, her homes, her cooking, even holiday gatherings for her large, blended family.

“Migrant Mother” has a serendipitous history, as Linda Gordon makes clear in “Dorothea Lange,” an absorbing, exhaustively researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in the rise of modern photojournalism. “I didn’t know a mule from a tractor,” Lange admitted.

Reading Linda Gordon's terrific new biography of Lange--Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits--sent me back to "Migrant Mother." Not to revisit the controversy that sometimes swirls around the photograph, but to think about why some images become iconic and some don't. As Gordon points out, Lange made many photos of migrant mothers and their children, and some of them are just as beautiful and just as haunting as her portrait of Thompson.

Lange, a photographer I have always admired, is brought to life through the pages of this book. As photographers we often attempt to reveal much about our subjects while shielding ourselves. I enjoyed this look at the woman behind the camera.

Linda Gordon discusses her book, "Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits " at Kepler's Books Oct. 14 2009.

An absorbing, exhaustively researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in the rise of modern photojournalism.

If you read this weekend’s NY Times Book Review, you might have seen where Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits was hailed as “an absorbing, exhaustively researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in the rise of modern photojournalism.” The book had first crossed my desk a few weeks ago, and when it arrived I had been curious about what had attracted NYU history professor Linda Gordon to Lange as a subject. The answer, which I’m able to share with you now, was surprising—and proof (if any were needed) that a writer should always strive to keep herself open to possibility.

The release of a new biography of Dorthea Lange by historian Linda Gordon is a reminder of the contemporary significance of her work. From her photos of the internment of Japanese Americans during WW II, to her remarkable photos of people mired in poverty and destitution during the Great Depression, Lange is regarded as one of the greatest photographic witnesses. Her work has profound resonance with contemporary times.

Linda Gordon is the biographer Lange deserves. She portrays her as both political heroine and self-centered artist, while carefully explaining how Lange’s difficult personal story—including ailments that made it painful for her to move around during the last 20 years of her life—colored her accomplishments, for good and ill. Gordon also pinpoints the vital part Lange played in New Deal culture, without slighting how her husbands, co-workers, bosses, subjects and the press helped shape her work. And the historian’s prose is both straightforward and evocative, an echo of Lange’s own elegant realism. This is, in sum, a work of dazzling intelligence and quiet beauty.

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, is the culmination of eight years of work by Linda Gordon, the Florence Kelley Professor of History at NYU and one of the country’s preeminent historians.

On Monday, dozens of descendants of Lange, Dixon, Cunningham, Partridge, and Lange's second husband, the UC Berkeley economics professor Paul Taylor, will gather in Berkeley to celebrate the publication of a major new biography of Lange. The book, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, is the culmination of eight years of work by Linda Gordon, the Florence Kelley Professor of History at NYU and one of the country's preeminent historians. But the celebration will be bittersweet. The party will be held at the home of the late Henry Mayer, who was working on a book about Lange when he died of a heart attack at 59. After Mayer's untimely death in July 2000, his widow looked for someone to continue the project, and Gordon stepped in.

My love of photography, and interest in Dorothea Lange, couldn’t let me pass up a new biography about her: Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon. Linda Gordon has written many history books, and I can’t wait to delve into this latest book of hers in order to learn more about Dorothea Lange’s life and photography.

Lange was by no means a perfect person, and that attracted me—I find myself less interested in stories that divide people into the evil and the good. I like complicated people and complicated plots.

Linda Gordon’s biography Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, distinguishes itself by giving us something of a postmodern Lange, one who acknowledges—and even celebrates—the ultimately unknowable inner lives of her subjects. Gordon emphasizes the similarity of Lange to the responsible historian: Both produce representations that aspire to accuracy but acknowledge the inherent limitations of that pursuit.

Historian Linda Gordon presents us with a portrait of the artist as a woman in her fascinating new biography of photographer Dorothea Lange [1895–1965], who captured the images of Americans on the move during the Great Depression.

To a startling degree, popular understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s derives from visual images, and among them, Dorothea Lange’s are the most influential.