Dorothea Lange

titled, dated, and extensively annotated by the photographer in ink and with her Resettlement Administration credit and descriptive caption stamps on the reverse, hinged to a modern mount, matted, 1936

Acquired by the present owner from PhotoWest Gallery, San Diego, 1990

Other prints of this image:

Robert Coles and Therese Heyman, Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifet.mes (Aperture, 1982), p. 73

Pierre Borhan, Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer (New York, 2002), p. 145

Howard M. Levin and Katherine Northrup, Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935-1939, Volume I (Glencoe, 1980), pp. 136-37

Hank O'Neal, A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and Its People, 1935-1943 (New York, 1976), p. 111

Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935-1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Boston, 1973), p. 89

Edward Steichen, ed., The Bitter Years: 1935-1941, Rural America As Seen by the Photographers of the Farm Security Administration (The Museum of Modern Art, 1962), unpaginated 

Robert S. McElvaine, ed., Down & Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man (Chapel Hill, 1983), cover

Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986), cover

Gretchen Garner, Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography (Baltimore, 2003), p. 48

Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 1996), p. 17

This early, slightly warm-toned print, on double-weight paper with a surface sheen, is in generally excellent condition. There is slight rubbings at the edges. There is very faint discoloration between the second and third (right) sitters at their hip level. When examined in raking light, slight silvering is visible in the dark areas, as well as a few small indentations and faint scratches that do not break the emulsion. The Resettlement Administration stamp indicates that the print was made some t.mes before 1937, when the agency was re-named the Farm Security Administration. This stamp provides entry lines for various categories of information, and Lange has entered in ink the date, negative location, place, title, and extensive notations.
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Drought Refugees from Oklahoma, an image by Lange that is startling in its immediacy, was made in August 1936, in Blythe, California, a small town on the Colorado River.  Situated in the desert, just over the Arizona border, Blythe was a stop on the long road west from Oklahoma, where years of drought had turned the ground into dust and driven hundreds of families off the land.  In Blythe, where temperatures in August soar well over 100 degrees, the landscape must have offered little hope to the thousands in search of a future. 

The present photograph, a scarce, early print of this memorable image, has an extensive caption in Lange's own hand on the reverse:

'Drought Refugees from Oklahoma, in California

'Drought Refugees from Oklahoma camping by the roadside.  They hope to work in the cotton.  Family of seven.

'The official at the border (Cal – Arizona) inspection service said that on this day Aug 17 1936  23 carloads and truckloads of indigent families out of the drought counties of Oklahoma and Arkansas had passed through that station, entering California up to 3 o'clock in the afternoon.'

What awaited most migrants, if they pushed further ahead, was the chance to get a day or a month of picking at low wages; if they were lucky, a spot in a migrant's camp; or, like the woman now known as Migrant Mother—whose photograph Lange had made just a few months earlier—the hopelessness of no crops, no work, and no home.  The family in the photograph offered here may well have sensed, as they sweltered in the heat, that they were close to what Lange described in other circumstances as 'the end of the line.'

The immediacy of Drought Refugees is due, as in her famous Migrant Mother, to Lange's noted talent for establishing trust with her subjects and enter with them into a collaborative effort.  Lange recounted how she tried hard to talk to the people she photographed: 'This was very helpful to me, and I think it was helpful to them.  It gave us a chance to meet on common ground' (quoted in Photographs of Lifet.mes , p. 116).  'She seemed to know that my pictures might help her,' she said of the Migrant Mother, 'and so she helped me' (ibid., p. 76).  What was spoken during the making of the Drought Refugees pictures is unknown; but instead of the turned-down head or the sideways glance, devices Lange used to great effect in her White Angel Breadline, Migrant Mother, and so many other photographs, we have here a full-face portrait of a man who looks directly and candidly into Lange's lens.  Another image, made at the same t.mes , shows the nursing mother bare-breasted, her face calm and defiant. 

In the fall of 1936, soon after Lange's drought refugee photographs were made, John Steinbeck was also in the field, visiting migrant camps in Salinas and Bakersfield, gathering information for a series of articles that would run in the San Francisco News that October.  Published under the series title, 'The Harvest Gypsies,' the articles described in vivid detail the grim life of the migratory workers, the conditions under which they lived, and the problems that lay ahead. 'In California we find a curious attitude toward a group that makes our agriculture successful,' the first article observed. 'The migrants are needed, and they are hated.'  The sub-headers for the articles summarized the author's themes: among them, 'Beaten, Bewildered'; 'Trailed by Starvation'; 'Starvation Terror'; 'Filth, Flies, Flu'; and 'Can't Get Relief.'   In 1938, the Simon J. Lubin Society, a charitable organization that hoped to inspire action on the migrant problem, brought Steinbeck's 'Harvest Gypsies' articles out in book form.  The title of the book, 'Their Blood Is Strong,' was taken from one of Steinbeck's sub-headers for a passage that reads in part,

'One has only to go into the squatters' camps where the families live on the ground and have no homes, no beds and no equipment; and one has only to the look at the strong purposeful faces, often filled with pain and more often, when they see the corporation-held idle lands, filled with anger, to know that this new race is here to stay and that heed must be taken of it' (p. 3).

The description could well have been written for the drought refugee family of Lange's photographs, one of which was used as the book's cover illustration.   

Two like-minded reformers, Lange and Steinbeck had few formal interactions, but they worked along parallel tracks in the 1930s, passionate in their efforts for social change. The veracity of Lange's images would have impressed Steinbeck especially, as he had lived among and reported on the very kinds of people she had photographed.  An examination of their respective bodies of work and the overlap between the two is beyond the scope of this entry, but as Carol Shloss has pointed out, in her chapter on Steinbeck and Lange in In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer: 1840 – 1940 (New York and Oxford, 1987), Steinbeck had followed the work that Lange and her husband Paul Schuster Taylor were doing in the field, and he was keenly aware of Lange's photographs, having spent t.mes in the F. S. A. files in Washington. 

Steinbeck's prize-wining novel, The Grapes of Wrath, the genesis of which can be found in the 'Harvest Gypsies,' was, like Lange's photographs, based on an intimate knowledge of his subjects and a willingness to see the world from their point of view.  It is no surprise that when the film of The Grapes of Wrath was made, the footage seemed to echo many of Lange's photographs.  As Therese Thau Heyman has observed, Lange 'had a good eye for casting.'  Lange's best pictures are alive with narrative and emotion, as in the Drought Refugees offered here.