Homework

I’ve been trying to piece together some things. It’s particularly difficult with the people I want to know about at the moment—Dorothea Lange and Clarence H. White. I have yet to find a decent biography on either of them. Lange has many books written about her, but amazingly nearly all of them (except Photographs of a Lifetime) are written for juvenile audiences—not exactly what you would call rigorous scholarship. However, images by and of Lange are easy to find. Exactly the opposite is the case with White. Though he was a prolific photographer, it is much easier to find work by his students than by him. Biographical information on White is fairly easy to find, but I could only piece together a gallery of fifteen images.

It’s interesting to me that Lange would be such an iconic figure for authors of juvenile literature. She had polio as a child, and had great difficulty in school. She barely passed high school, and though she enrolled in Columbia Teacher’s College, she dropped out to become a photographer. She attended one class at the Clarence White School of Photography, but never completed any of White’s assignments. They are especially proud of that fact in the extant biographies. A perfect role model for children—a woman who never did her homework.