AMERICAN MASTERS: “DOROTHEA LANGE: GRAB A HUNK OF LIGHTNING”
PBS, 9:00 p.m. ET
Despite one foot deformed by polio, or perhaps in part because of it, Dorothea Lange became a photographer who focused extensively, and invaluably, on the usually unseen and ignored: migrant workers and farmers in the Dust Bowl of the Thirties, Japanese-Americans forced into U.S. internment camps in the Forties, and so on. The images she captured are haunting, and linger with you – as does this very informative, understandably tender biographical study. Dyanna Taylor, who’s worked on PBS’s American Masters profiles of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, is this documentary’s writer, producer, director and narrator. She also happens to be Lange’s granddaughter – and her perspective here enhances, rather than disrupts or dilutes, the finished product. Check local listings.