Dorothea Lange:

1. Dorothea Lange: Empathizing with victims of the Great Depression

2. Farm Security Administration Field Notes by Dorothea Lange: • Texas tenant farmer in Marysville migrant camp during peach season • 1927 – made $7,000 in cotton • 1928 – broke even • 1929 – went in the hole • 1930 – still deeper • 1931 – lost everything • 1932 – hit the road • 1935 – fruit tramp in California • (Now lives in homemade trailer.)

3. The Migrant Mother, California Slide 3.2A • Taken at a pea-picker’s camp in northern California • Living on wild vegetables and birds killed by the children • Had just sold their tent to purchase food • Lange’s title reads: “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two.”

4. Family on the Road, Midwest Slide 3.2B • Migrant family in search of a better life 1938 • “blown off” their land by the Dust Bowl • Lange saw hundreds and hundreds of families just like this one

5. Man Beside Wheelbarrow, San Francisco Slide 3.2C • Lange commented about this picture: • “I’d begun to get a firmer grip on the things I really wanted to do in my work. This photograph of the man with his head on his arms for instance – five years earlier, I would have thought enough to take a picture of a man, no more. But now, I wanted to take a picture of a man as he stood in the world – in this case, a man with his head down, with his back against the wall, with his livelihood, like the wheelbarrow, overturned.”

6. Evicted Sharecroppers camping along the highway, U.S. Highway 61, Missouri Slide 3.2D • These sharecroppers work had been replaced by machines • Most had nowhere else to go • Lange wrote: • “The sharecropper system is collapsing. . . . and croppers are being cut from the land. In protest, hundreds of families – white and black victims of its devastation – left their cabins in January 1939 to camp along 150 miles of open road.”