“Let’s think about the city, the one we live in and the one we could live in if we bent our energies and resources to creating the most habitable, aesthetically pleasing urban space that we could. Now this is an entirely appropriate exercise, for beyond physical space cities occupy a place in the realm of human possibilities and are a reflection of our social spirit. To think of the city this way means having a vision of it and to help us define that vision I’m pleased to welcome Anne Spirn, author and professor in the department of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

Anne you have been called, and I think very aptly after reading your work, an urban visionary. I think that owes to the depth of practical insight and, quite frankly, poetic prose you bring to your writings on urban space. I’d also say you’re something of a historian, and I’d like to start us with a reference to history.” -George Seay

“We read books to read ourselves and the world around us, to learn the coordinates of our lives by situating them in other lives and in our surroundings. What rewards there are, then, in a book that gives us a new language, the language of landscape, to interpret and understand what nature and human hands have wrought about us. This language allows us a greater expression of E. M. Forester’s timely injunction “only connect,” and it reminds us that we are part of the whole. My guest is Anne Whiston Spirn, author of The Language of Landscape.” – George Seay

Explore the projects, public resources, and history at the WPLP website.

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 defining images of that time, capturing a country and a people on the brink of cataclysmic change.

But her iconic images don’t come close to telling the whole story. Lange viewed her photographs as part of sequenced narratives, 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, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest during 1939. Lange’s images of squatter camps, beleaguered 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. Lange’s words and photographs speak powerfully to the present, for the dynamics she saw and recorded are still shaping American lives and landscapes.

Daring to Look began with a simple idea: to bring together a selection of Lange’s photographs and her reports from the field. A brief introduction would sketch the context of Lange’s life and work, an epilogue would bring the story back to the present. Not so simple, as it turned out. The book expanded into a more complex work whose shape emerged from the material. First, there were Lange’s reports from the field. I had encountered one in 1969 in the appendix to Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman. Despite the fact that Lange’s text was titled “Typical Field Documentation,” I found no further reports until thirty years later when I decided to try and find them. Why had they not been published before? Why did Lange begin to write long field reports in 1939? How was that year significant? The search for answers produced further mysteries. Why was Lange fired at the end of 1939? Then there were the people and places Lange described. What had happened to them? Did the government programs that Lange portrayed succeed? Each step exposed a story, and one story led to another.

Nearly forty years ago, Lange’s work revealed the synergy in what had seemed, in my own life, to be conflicting interests – the study of art and the making of art, the observing and portraying of the world and acting to change it. In Lange I found an ethnographer’s eye, a writer’s ear, an artist’s vision. In Lange, the word and the image, the documentary and the work of art, are one. She inspired me to integrate my own passions rather than to elect one and exclude others, and I moved from art history to landscape architecture, a profession that gave scope to history, ecology, and anthropology, to design, planning, and photography, and to practice as well as scholarship. In the years since, I have come back again and again to Lange’s American Country Woman and to her 1939 work An American Exodus, written with Paul Taylor, as models for how to capture in photographs and extend in words the meanings of visual images, with the camera an instrument of discovery.

To Dorothea Lange, I owe a great intellectual and artistic debt. My decision to produce a book of her unpublished texts stemmed from a desire to repay that debt, but my debt to her is far greater now than before. Lange once said, speaking for the Farm Security Administration’s photographers, that “the government gave us a magnificent education.” Dorothea Lange’s photographs and words, the places they led and the people I met there, gave me a magnificent education.

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