"In this thoughtful and meticulously researched account of Lange's career, Spirn focuses on the photographer's largely unpublished 1939 portfolio and champions it as a mix of the visual and the verbal. Lange's stark photographs and accompanying field reports testify to her desire to show real Depression-era Americans-displaced and downtrodden, but carrying on nevertheless-as honestly as possible; they are published as a whole in the second section of Spirn's book....Spirn, a photographer herself, traces Lange's path, visiting her locations and subjects in a fascinating series of ''then and now'' shots, an homage to Lange, who Spirn compellingly argues deserves to take her place as ''one of the most important American artists of the Twentieth Century.''
- Publishers Weekly

"Dorothea Lange is one of America's greatest documentary photographers. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field is a very important book. It provides a fascinating insight into her FSA photographs and writings during that time. Ms. Lange's photographs, especially the work she did for the FSA were a great inspiration for so many photographers, including myself."
- Mary Ellen Mark, photographer

The Book




The last part of the book recounts my own journey to the places Lange photographed in 1939, what I saw there, the people I met, and what they told me. Lange’s photographs were my passport into foreign territory.

They led, for example, to eastern Oregon and to Allen Brown, a ditch rider for the Owyhee Irrigation District, who introduced me to families I knew from Lange’s photographs and to others who took their farms out of the sage brush in the 1930s; he showed me how to ride ditches, and taught me about water in the arid West.

The stories Lange told in 1939 are still unfolding; somehow, in the process of tracing her stories, they became my own. Much has changed since 1939, but much is the same.


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