Biographies for Tweens: Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange

Partridge, Elizabeth. (1998). Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange. New York, NY: Viking.

Dorothea Lange is one of America’s great photographers. She recorded the impoverished conditions that many Americans were living in during the Great Depression. Lange grew up in New York and New Jersey. Lange had a difficult childhood;

she battles with polio that left her with a limp and when she was twelve her father abandoned the family. As an adult Dorothea moved to San Francisco where she opened a portrait studio, married her first husband and had two sons. In 1934, Lange went to work with Paul Taylor, who would

later become her second husband, photographing the conditions in migrant worker camps across California.

Lange and Taylor’s reports helped obtain federal funding to help people living in poverty. Later in life Dorothea was forced to stop traveling due to poor health, but she continued photographing.

Restless Spirit is an elegantly written portrait of one of America’s greatest photographers. Lange was very devoted to the work she was doing with Taylor and had to overcome physical difficulty of her limp to photograph in the field. Lange had a passion for her work and helping the less fortunate. Lange was a truly talented photographer who had the amazing ability to put her subjects at ease and capture their souls on film.

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