A season of books on Dorothea Lange

In this week's New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban examines two new books about Dorothea Lange: Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is a biography and Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field is an in-depth look at Lange's experiences in 1939.

Raban clearly has something he wants to say before he jumps into the books: His essay puts Lange's Farm Security Administration work in an interesting European-derived context... a context which he thinks is strangely (but appropriately) applicable to the American West. In a nutshell:

[V]ersions of [the European] pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, "The Fenimore Cooper Indian" (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson's sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.

The whole essay is a fine read. (And if you have as much trouble reading NYRB essays online as I do, know that this one prints out at seven pages.)

Related: Raban mentions the Oakland Museum of California's online Lange archive. Et voila.