Monday, Aug. 30, 2010

New book chronicles Dust Bowl history

Professor writes on Lange, her husband

Dorothea Lange and husband Paul Taylor chronicled Dust Bowl migrants in California more the 70 years ago.

Lange did it in photographs -- women keeping house in ragged tents, men at the wheel of cars packed with all they owned.

Taylor, a lesser-known labor economist, did it in writings and speeches that appealed to a nation's compassion amid the Great Depression.

Their work is the subject of a new book by Jan Goggans, an assistant professor of literature at UC Merced.

The book -- "California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor and the Making of a New Deal Narrative" -- describes the professional and romantic passions that drove these two people.

"She saw things as an artist, as a portrait photographer, and he saw things through labor economics and history," Goggans said in a recent interview. "When they combined these, it was riveting."

Lange is known best for the Migrant Mother, her photo of a beleaguered woman with three of her children in a Central Coast pea field in 1936.