⇒ Read Learning to See A Novel of Dorothea Lange the Woman Who Revealed the Real America Elise Hooper Books

Learning to See A Novel of Dorothea Lange the Woman Who Revealed the Real America Elise Hooper Books

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Learning to See A Novel of Dorothea Lange the Woman Who Revealed the Real America Elise Hooper Books

A fantastic novel. Elise Hooper brings Dorothea Lange to life in this fictionalized account of her life. I loved reading about the transition in Lange's photography from photographing society women to documenting conditions during the Depression and World War II Internement Camps. By including all the information about Lange's friends, marriages and struggles with her children, Hooper shows the complexities of Lange's life and how it contributed to her photography


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Learning to See A Novel of Dorothea Lange the Woman Who Revealed the Real America Elise Hooper Books Reviews

Learning to See tells the story of Dorothea Lange’s extraordinary life and her efforts to expose severe social injustices during the 1930s and 1940s. Lange spent the early years of her career in San Francisco as a portrait photographer. After her marriage begins to crumble and the U.S. economy collapses with the onset of the Great Depression, Lange must find a way to support her two young sons. She begins to travel around California capturing images of the Dust Bowl migrants and others who headed west during the 1930s transforming herself into an advocate and activist for the poor. After World War 2 began, Lange focused on the Japanese American internment camps exposing the horrific conditions under which these poor people were placed.

Dorothea Lange’s photographs from the Great Depression era and the Japanese American internment camps are iconic and part of the fabric of our culture. Hooper’s novel brings the woman behind those photos to life including the sacrifices she made personally to bring about social change for those less fortunate. I loved that Hooper includes some of Lange’s photographs at the end of the book. While I was familiar with some of them, there were several I had never seen before, and it was enthralling to pore over the photos and Hooper’s caption for each photo.

Learning to See is a tribute to an important American whose humanitarian efforts shone a spotlight on the poor and later the incarceration of Japanese Americans. The structure of the book is fabulous – Hooper begins in 1964 as Lange has received a letter from MoMA about launching a retrospective of her work and then travels back in time to tell Lange’s tale. I cannot say enough good things about Learning to See; Elise Hooper has written a book that every American should read about an important person and era in the history of the United States.
I come from a long line of amateur photographers, so I’ve long been familiar with the real Dorothea Lange’s work. Reading a fictionalized version of her life, then, was something I was eager to do. Having read and enjoyed author Elise Hooper’s freshman outing, The Other Alcott, I was familiar with her crisp, no-nonsense style, one that makes her extrapolations feel like proper docu-dramas. In this case, I imagined Katharine Hepburn playing the lead character, though I’m not sure why. Possibly because Lange is from the time period that lends itself to that ‘trans-Atlantic’ accent.

I immediately fell in love with both the historic San Francisco setting, and the character at the heart of the novel, the prickly, feisty, determined Lange herself. Like her, I’m a brunette, and hardly a ‘looker,’ and have had to rely on brains and talent (as we all should, really), so I empathized with her a lot. Immediately I was thankful that she was living in a time when women in trousers was finally acceptable – how much easier to hide that ‘withered right leg’ that way.

Of course, it wasn’t just Lange’s struggle to become successful as an artist that intrigued me, but also her perspective on the world. She humanized the American poor, and, equally importantly, turned her lens on our worst selves, documenting the truth of the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

Hooper’s novel shows us this, of course, but she also lets us see Lange’s private self the young mother struggling to raise two children in the Depression-era economy, and balancing the need to make a living with the innate requirement that she must retain her own sense of integrity, both personal and artistic.

This is a novel, not a biography, but it’s a compelling and fascinating read, and where it may err in facts, it resounds with truth.

Goes well with bacon, eggs, pancakes, and a steaming mug of black coffee.
Elise Hooper has a way with words! She has a way of writing that can grab you in and make you feel like part of the story. Her passion combined with knowledge and research truly has made for another amazing read by her!
A fantastic novel. Elise Hooper brings Dorothea Lange to life in this fictionalized account of her life. I loved reading about the transition in Lange's photography from photographing society women to documenting conditions during the Depression and World War II Internement Camps. By including all the information about Lange's friends, marriages and struggles with her children, Hooper shows the complexities of Lange's life and how it contributed to her photography