On Thursday, April 15, Professor Linda Gordon will deliver an illustrated lecture on "Visual Democracy: How Dorothea Lange Used Photography to Promote Equality" at 7 p.m. in Hill Memorial Library on the LSU campus. This free event is sponsored by the LSU Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and the LSU Department of History. It is part of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Visiting Scholar Program, which supports visits of distinguished scholars to campuses around the nation.

Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. Her most recent book, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, has been called a "riveting portrait of one of America's most renowned photographers" and an "astonishing and deeply moving biography of Dorothea Lange." In her lecture, Gordon will investigate the fundamental nature of documentary photography, a form of representation created in the 20th century, which is often associated with efforts to create a more free and democratic society. Lange, arguably the most influential practitioner of documentary photography, was an ardent supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal." She also, however, extended that democratizing vision in a direction the New Deal refused to go - toward challenging race prejudice. Using Lange's photographs as examples, Gordon will discuss whether committed, purposeful, reform-oriented creations be "art." The lecture will include images from Lange's work in Louisiana, which are seldom seen.

Before joining the NYU faculty, Gordon taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Vilas Distinguished Research Professor, and at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her publications include Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (revised and reissued as The Moral Property of Women); Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (Joan Kelly Prize for the best book in women's history, AHA); Women, the State and Welfare (editor); Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the Origins of Welfare (Berkshire Prize); The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Bancroft Prize, Beveridge Prize); Dear Sisters:
Dispatches from Women's Liberation (co-editor); Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (editor).

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians, she was the Lawrence Stone Visiting Chair at Princeton, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and recipient of numerous fellowships. In 2002 she received the Wilbur Cross medal of Yale University.

For additional information concerning this free event, call 225-578-6552 or email esmyth@lsu.edu.