Learning to See by Elise Hooper: A Novel of Dorothea Lange, the Woman who Revealed the Real America

I knew the photography of Dorothea Lange but little about her personal life so I was glad to be given the opportunity to read Learning to See by Elise Hooper.

Hooper's novel offers an accessible narrative of Lange's life from her point of view. Lange's childhood polio left her with a limp from a deformed foot. She established a successful portrait photography career until the Depression when her work dwindled. With two children and an artist husband, Lange had to give up her studio to work for the Farm Security Administration.

Migrant mother photo by Dorothea Lange

Using her portrait experience, Lange created iconic photographs that recorded the devastation of the Dust Bowl and the misery of farm migrants. During WWII she was employed by the Office of War Information to document the internment of Japanese Americans.

Internment camp photo by Dorothea Lange

Through Lange's eyes, readers experience the human suffering of poverty and systemic racism.

Lange's marriage to her first husband, artist Maynard Dixon, was strained. Her extensive traveling meant leaving her sons and the book addresses her son's anger and acting out. While photographing for the OWI she worked with Paul Taylor who became her second husband.

Famous photographers appear in the story's background, including Ansel Adams.

The novel is "inspired" by Lange's life. Hooper offers a woman filled with doubts and remorse while facing up to the authorities who repress the photographs that too honestly recorded atrocities and the forgotten.

Lange's life as an artist and a woman will enthrall readers.

Learning to See
Elise Hooper
William Morrow
On Sale Date: January 22, 2019
ISBN: 9780062686534, 0062686534
$15.99 USD, $19.99 CAD, £9.99 GBP

Learn more about Lange at

American Experience:
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/bios/dorothea-lange/
MoMA:
https://www.moma.org/artists/3373
The J. Paul Getty Museum
http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/1656/dorothea-lange-american-1895-1965/
The Library of Congress:
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0013.html

Self Portrait With Boy

Art is rooted in experience, and artists plumb their lives for their art. I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald and how he appropriated Zelda's letters and diaries and story for his work, or Thomas Wolfe whose first novel Look Homeward, Angel caused a ruckus in his hometown that was so thinly veiled in the book. And I think of Elizabeth Strout's recent novel My Name is Lucy Barton whose character is told she must be ruthless in her art. Artists are faced with telling the truth or protecting others.

On the first page of Self Portrait With Boy, we are told the main character,  photographer Lu Rile, is described as "ruthless," single minded. Lu, looking back on what happened twenty years previous, talks about the trauma behind the work that catapulted her into the limelight.

The novel begins with Lu admitting that at age twenty-six "there were so many people I had not yet become." I loved that line because it reflects how I have seen my life since I was a teenager: life as a continual process of growth and change, so that we become different people as we age.

Lu was a squatter in an old factory inhabited by artists. She worked several low paying jobs and barely scraped by. She felt like an outsider, a girl who grew up poor and does not understand the world of the well-off and well-known artists around her.

Because she can not afford anything else, Lu became her own model and every day takes a self portrait. One day, she set the timer on her camera and jumped, naked, in front of the large windows in her unheated apartment. When she developed the film she discovered that in the background she has captured the fatal fall of a child.

The child's parents became alienated in their grief, the successful artist father moving out while the mother, Kate, leaned on Lu for support. It had been years since Lu had been close to anyone. She is unable to tell Kate about the photograph.

Weird occurrences made Lu believe the boy was haunting her and she became desperate to get rid of the photograph. Lu's father needed money for surgery, and she was pressured to join the others in the building in hiring a lawyer. Lu knew her photo was an amazing work and she struggled between reaching for success and the love she felt for Kate and her admiration for Steve.

Rachel Lyon's writing is amazing. I loved how she used sights, sounds, and aromas to make Lu's world real. This is her debut novel.

Self-Portrait with Boy: A Novel
by Rachel Lyon
Scribner
Pub Date 06 Feb 2018 
ISBN: 9781501169588
PRICE: $26.00

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera.

The Great Nadar.

Who?

The Man Behind the Camera.

I had no clue who Nadar was. But, reading the promo blurb and learning that this Nadar knew every important Parisian artist and writer, my interest was piqued.

Adam Begley's book The Great Nadar introduced me to this 19th c Parisian luminary who loved the 'new' and was on the cutting edge of every development.

Nadar (1820-1910) was born Gaspard-Felix Tournachon. His nickname, Nadar, came from his friends when a young man, and it became his "trademark and most valuable property."

He was a master in self-promoting. He was a risk taker who gave 100% to every new venture. He was a failed medical student. He "threw himself" into "startup newspapers and little magazines." He was the ultimate Bohemian living in poverty. He reinvented himself as a successful caricaturist and then as a pioneering photographer. He was a balloonist who envisioned helicopters and was the first to take an aerial photograph. During the Siege of Paris, his balloonists got news out to the world. He then helped get news into Paris through microfilm inserted into quills that were carried by homing pigeons.

A tall, thin man with orange hair, Nadar was beloved by his friends for his brilliant conversation and high spirits. He had impeccable taste in furnishing his photography studio and an impressive art collection. Nadar hobnobbed with the great stars of his time and they all sat for him to photograph.

His photography was familiar to me. He had the ability to capture his subject's nature and character. After reading Elizabeth Berg's novel on George Sand, The Dream Lover, I went online to learn more about Sand. It was Nadar's photographs that I found.

George Sand photographed by Nadar

I had known his work long before I knew Nadar himself.

I enjoyed this biography. Nadar was forever fascinating. The many presentations of Nadar's work was wonderful.

I received a free ebook through First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Great Nadar
by Adam Begley
Crown/Duggan
$30 (256p)
ISBN 978-1-101-90260-8