American Pastoral -> A review of two books about Dorothea Lange in the New York Review of Books →

“For the mask-like portrait, she moved her camera a few inches to her right, so that the razor-edged triangular shadow of the man’s nose exactly meets the cleft of his upper lip, and lowered it to make him loom above the viewer. What is remarkable is how she transformed the merry fellow in high sunshine into the unsettling and deathly face of the print. It might be titled The Last of His Race, or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race. There is, alas, no record of what the subject thought of his metamorphosis into a gaunt symbol of extinction.” (…)