Reviews for

Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange

New York Times 1995
Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life includes scholarly essays and personal remembrances about Lange (1895-1965) -- the feminist heroine, the wife, lover and mother, the photographer of Japanese internment camps. There is also an interview with Ansel Adams, with whom Lange worked. The most fascinating texts in the book are Lange's and that of her oldest son, Daniel Dixon. He writes that this mother never described herself as an artist, but as a "witness and observer." Lange was an artist, and many of the photographs included here bear witness to that fact.  

Los Angeles Times 1994
As a child, Partridge knew Lange, so the portrait she paints of the artist is warmly personal, as might be expected. What makes her writing special, however, is its objectivity. Lange was by all accounts a difficult woman, and Partridge tells it like it was, but her love for Lange and respect for her work temper the less-than-flattering revelations she wisely includes. Partridge's fascinating profile is complemented by dozens of wonderful pictures, many you'll have seen before and will greet as old friends, while the lesser-known images Partridge has selected for inclusion deserve to be seen. 

Kirkus 1994
A general introduction to the life and work of photojournalist Lange that draws on family remembrances, scholarly evaluations, and a handsome picture portfolio. Six essays, one interview, and a healthy black-and-white picture section make up this composite introduction to Lange (18951965), best known for her US Farm Security Administration images of Depression-era migrant workers.

Editor Partridge grew up in Lange's loosely knit family fold (her father worked as an assistant), and her warm introduction details the tension between Lange's motherly impulses and her irascible nature. In a 1976 interview, Ansel Adams comments on shared technical hardships, Lange's marriage to activist Paul Taylor, and her ``absolute sexless beauty.'' Roger Daniels (History/Univ. of Chicago) looks at Lange's work documenting Japanese Americans interned by the War Relocation Authority during WW II. And an incisive essay by Sally Stein (Art History/Univ. of California, Irvine) discusses Lange's fascination with bodily depictions (she had been crippled by childhood polio and was dogged by lifelong physical infirmities).

Most telling, though, are the photographs themselves. One from 1937, taken at a sharecropper's cabin in Coahoma County, Miss., shows only a black woman's bare feet in the foreground, poised elegantly one atop the other on the dusty and worn boards of a front porch. Another, from 1938, records campaign posters taped to a Waco, Texas, gas station window. The sternly optimistic faces of the candidates surround painted sign lettering that reads: ``Washing/Greasing/Storage.'' Both images are blunt and literal, relying on secondary association for political or allegorical impact. Later photographs draw from Lange's extensive world travels. (Partridge has produced a companion film to accompany the book.)