In February of 1940, shortly after her job with the Farm Security Administration ended, Dorothea Lange was appointed Head Photographer for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), a division of the Department of Agriculture. Lange took a number of trips through California and Arizona for the BAE, documenting life in agricultural communities. Although the position lasted less than a year, it resulted in approximately 200 negatives, most notably, the photograph offered here.

This photograph shows a migrant cotton picker in the dusty town of Eloy, as he pauses at the cotton scale. An agricultural town in southern Arizona, Eloy was one of the many stops on the road for the migratory worker during the Great Depression. Lange referred to it as a ‘raw cotton town.’ Her caption for the image underscores the hard life of the cotton picker: ‘Resting at cotton wagon before returning to work in the field. He has been picking cotton all day. A good picker earns about two dollars a day working, at this t.mes of year, about ten hours’ (The Photographs of Dorothea Lange, p. 55).

Early prints of this image are rare. Only two other comparable prints have been offered at auction in the last two decades.