Beyond the Image: The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik

On the site of San Francisco's Transamerica Tower, there once stood a four story building known as the Monkey Block, though its proper name was the Montgomery Building. This area was once the city's notorious red-light district, which went by the name the Barbary Coast, but it was also the center of San Francisco's thriving bohemian culture. 

The Monkey Block was the home for the artists, writers, actors, musicians and others who flocked to the city starting in the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. The noted photographer Dorothea Lange became a part of the lifestyle there, after arriving in 1918 from New Jersey. She first was a society portrait photographer but her interests changed and she became known as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Great Depression, taking many indelible images of the plight of the migrants who went west during the period's worst days, and battled the drought of the Dust Bowl along with their lack of money and employment. 

The Bohemians tells a novelized version of her life story in an imagined first person account that incorporates many actual biographical facts, along with the many significant individuals who made up her friends and social circle, along with an ambiguous portrait of her first husband, the artist Maynard Dixon.

One significant fictionalized character is Caroline Lee, a half-Chinese/half-Caucasian woman who becomes her best friend and her partner in her photography studio. Lee is based somewhat on Lange's actual assistant, a Chinese woman named Ah Lee. Ah Lee was rescued as a child by the crusading missionary Donaldina Cameron. Cameron ran an orphanage for Chinese girls who would otherwise have been sold into prostitution or worse in San Francisco's Chinatown before and after the 1906 earthquake. Cameron also makes a significant appearance in the book. 

Author Jasmin Darznik brings together fact and fiction and blends them seamlessly. In addition to this being Lange's story, it is also a homage to San Francisco and its fascinating mix of bohemians, capitalists, politicians and others, admirable and some very much not. It is a vivid trip to a city that is the favorite of many, most of whom know little of its history, but are captivated by its beauty, unique geography and today, celebrated multicultural appeal and tolerance of "alternate" lifestyles.