The big empty

DOrothea LANGE'S photograph "Migrant Mother" (1936), which shows a plaintive, destitute woman surrounded by her children at the height of the Depression, secured her place as one of the most distinguished documentary photographers of all time. That image has appeared, and been appropriated, countless times -- on a U.S. postage stamp, on magazine covers, even in an ad for the A&E series "California and the Dream Seekers." Whatever its uses, the image defines and transcends an American moment.

Fortunately, Lange was no one-shot photographer. Born in New Jersey in 1895, she later moved west, opening a portrait studio in San Francisco in 1919. She often traveled the Southwest, photographing Hopi Indians, and then, with the Depression taking its toll, she began to shoot street scenes. From 1935 to 1939, she worked on and off for the Resettlement Administration, which would become the Farm Security Administration, a government agency that aided farmers and farm workers and also hired photographers to document conditions around the country. Lange continued to photograph through the '40s and '50s; her reputation as one of the premier photographers of her generation was ratified in 1966, the year after her death, with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A remarkable group of photographers worked for the Farm Security Administration -- among them Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein. Over time, each has received spasms of attention, and now it seems to be Lange's turn again. In 2006, her government-sponsored yet quickly censored images of Japanese American internment were published. And now Anne Whiston Spirn brings us a selection of Lange's work -- 149 photographs -- from 1939, most of them previously unpublished, though almost all are available through the Library of Congress' online catalog.

"Daring to Look" is a hybrid work, part personal essay, part portfolio of photographs, part scholarly catalog of captions and negatives. A professor of landscape architecture at MIT, photographer and author of "The Language of Landscape," Spirn argues strenuously that Lange must be appreciated not solely for her portraits but for her landscapes as well, and that any consideration of Lange must take into account not only images but also words -- the general notes and specific captions that the photographer wrote.