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During the GreatDepression, the federal government commissioned photographers to document theimpoverished and the disadvantaged, forming a stark record in black and whiteof the 1930s. Dorothea Lange, one of the era’s great photographers of ordinaryAmericans, is the subject of a magisterial biography by New York Universityhistory professor Linda Gordon. Writing with deep insight gained throughextensive reading of the record of Lange’s life, Gordon finds a complicatedwoman behind the camera, inking her work to a progressive vision of social andpolitical reform whose agenda remains unfulfilled.