Reprint. Originally published: 1982.

"An Aperture monograph."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 180-182).

Throughout her long working life, Dorothea Lange was an exceptional, often brilliant photographer. In the historic decade of the thirties, she was more - a pioneer, a shaper of the medium, and a motivator of the national conscience. Lange's direct, compelling studies of people forced from the land are both a faithful chronicle and a landmark of twentieth-century photography. In her later years, she brought this unique vision to rural communities as diverse as the Mormons of Utah, the countryfolk of Ireland, the fellaheen of Egypt. Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime is the most comprehensive collection of the artist's work ever to be published. It begins with portraits from her early years, when she was San Francisco's most fashionable studio photographer, and it concludes with images from her final years, when Lange traveled the globe, then, finally, turned her lens toward children and grandchildren, home, and the familiar objects and events of her daily life. In a penetrating critical biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles offers an incisive study of Lange's life and work. As one of the great contemporary social investigators, Coles explores in Lange's methods and accomplishments those qualities that enable the "artist-observer" to satisfy the objectivity expected of chroniclers and the subjective emotional involvement of the artist's personal vision. Accompanying the photographs are Lange's own reminiscences and observations, collected from her writings and from interviews made shortly before her death in 1965.