DOROTHEA LANGE: American Photographs by Therese...

DOROTHEA LANGE: American Photographs by Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips & John Szarkowski (Chronicle Books: $24.95; 192 pp., paperback original). Lang rejected the notion that a photographer could be a “neutral” observer, and her commitment to social justice is reflected in her choice of subjects. During the ‘30s and ‘40s, she prepared dramatic studies of labor activists in San Francisco, impoverished migrant farm workers, black sharecroppers in the South and Japanese-Americans undergoing forced relocation. The program from an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “American Photographs” presents a stark record of social change.