Near the end of her career, Dorothea Lange lamented, "No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually....I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves." Lange, however, did look, unflinchingly turning her lens on the despair, degradation, and greed unleashed by the Great Depression, and her photographs for the New Deal's Farm Security Administration have become the defining images of that time, capturing a country and a people on the brink of cataclysmic change.

But the iconic images we all know don't come close to telling the whole story. Lange viewed her photographs as part of sequenced narratives, contextualized and enriched by her descriptive captions — without which, she wrote, "half the value of fieldwork is lost." Daring to Look presents never-before-published photos and captions from Lange's fieldwork in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina during 1939. Lange's images of squatter camps, benighted farmers, and stark landscapes are stunning, and her captions — which range from simple explanations of settings to historical notes and biographical sketches — add unexpected depth, bringing her subjects and their struggles unforgettably to life, often in their own words.

When Lange was dismissed from the Farm Security Administration at the end of 1939, these photos and field notes were consigned to archives, where they languished, rarely seen. With Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn not only returnsthem to the public eye, but sets them in the context of Lange's pioneering life, work, and struggle for critical recognition — firmly placing Lange in her rightful position at the forefront of American photography.

"In this thoughtful and meticulously researched account of Lange's career, Spirn focuses on the photographer's largely unpublished 1939 portfolio and champions it as a masterful mix of the visual and the verbal. Lange's stark photographs and accompanying field reports testify to her desire to show real Depression-era Americans — displaced and downtrodden, but carrying on nevertheless — as honestly as possible; they are published as a whole in the second section of Spirn's book. These photographs include Lange's much vaunted portraits — of sharecroppers hunched in tobacco fields and mothers with their hungry children — as well as some of her lesser known landscape photography. The reverential Spirn, a photographer herself, traces Lange's path, visiting her locations and subjects in a fascinating series of 'then and now' shots, an homage to Lange, who Spirn compellingly argues deserves to take her place as 'one of the most important American artists of the Twentieth Century.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Dorothea Lange has long been regarded as one of the most brilliant photographic witnesses we have ever had to the peoples and landscapes of America, but until now no one has fully appreciated the richness with which she wove images together with words to convey her insights about this nation. We are lucky indeed that Anne Whiston Spirn, herself a gifted photographer and writer, has now recovered Lange's field notes and woven them into a rich tapestry of texts and images to help us reflect anew on Lange's extraordinary body of work."--William Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

"Dorothea Lange is known as one of the greatest American photographers, but she was also a remarkable observer whose field notes have largely remained unpublished until now. In Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn, a landscape architect, photographer, and writer herself, has edited Langes field notes, adding her own interpretative essays on Langes work, and rephotographing some of Lange's sites. This is a very important book deserving wide readership because it provides a wonderful combination of the socially conscious work of two gifted artists and writers."-Dolores Hayden, Yale University

"Dorothea Lange is one of America's greatest documentary photographers. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field is a very important book. It provides a fascinating insight into her FSA photographs and writings during that time. Ms. Lange's photographs, especially the work she did for the FSA were a great inspiration for so many photographers, including myself."--Mary Ellen Mark, photographer

Daring to Look presents never-before-published photos and captions from Dorothea Lange's fieldwork in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina during 1939. Lange's images of squatter camps, benighted farmers, and stark landscapes are stunning, and her captions--which range from simple explanations of settings to historical notes and biographical sketches--add unexpected depth, bringing her subjects and their struggles unforgettably to life, often in their own words.When Lange was dismissed from the Farm Security Administration at the end of 1939, these photos and field notes were consigned to archives, where they languished, rarely seen. With Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn not only returns them to the public eye, but sets them in the context of Lange's pioneering life, work, and struggle for critical recognition--firmly placing Lange in her rightful position at the forefront of American photography. A] thoughtful and meticulously researched account of Lange's career. . . . Spirn, a photographer herself, traces Lange's path, visiting her locations and subjects in a fascinating series of 'then and now' shots.--Publishers Weekly Dorothea Lange has long been regarded as one of the most brilliant photographic witnesses we have ever had to the peoples and landscapes of America, but until now no one has fully appreciated the richness with which she wove images together with words to convey her insights about this nation. We are lucky indeed that Anne Whiston Spirn, herself a gifted photographer and writer, has now recovered Lange's field notes and woven them into a rich tapestry of texts and images to help us reflect anew on Lange's extraordinary body of work.--William Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis

Anne Whiston Spirn is professor of landscape architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A photographer herself, she is the author of The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design and The Language of Landscape.