Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

In June 2007, the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University organized its first summer seminar on “Writing Past Lives: Biography as History,” which sought to investigate “how a focus on individual lives can further historical analysis.” One of the plenary speakers was Linda Gordon, who was invited to speak on her work on the biography of American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. The first picture which she showed was neither “Migrant Mothe...