Dorothea Lange was an extraordinary photographer. Born in 1895, she first worked for Arnold Genthe and studied with Clarence White at Columbia University. She got as far as San Francisco on a trip around the world started in 1918, and finding herself stranded, opened a photographic studio. She met Paul Taylor who would become her second husband and he hired her to document migratory workers in California.

The wartime demands of the First World War ended suddenly with the Armistice in 1918. The 1920s was a period of unregulated speculation that resulted in agricultural overproduction and declining prices. When the Great Depression struck an already depressed rural America, the effect was devastating.

In 1935 Lange began to work for the Resettlement Administration, which would later become the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The New Deal was to provide low-cost loans and assistance for poor farmers and sharecroppers; erection of regional model settlements for the resettlement of migrant farmers and farm workers; construction of camps of migrant farm workers; recultivation of eroded land; controls for river pollution and flood protection measures. Lange and the other FSA photographers had the mission of documenting the conditions that existed for the poor in rural areas and in farmlands. They were to document the conditions and then record the results of the agency's efforts to address the needs.

At the time Lange took this picture of a man referred to as a "bindle-stick," the depression had long been embedded in most rural areas of the country. A bindle-stick was a hobo who carried all his worldly possessions in a rolled up bundle. Many people were forced into various hobo life styles of traveling to wherever they could get a job of any sort or where they knew food and shelter might be available. This included hopping on trains and traveling near and far.

As deep unemployment continued, hobo's developed their own language and routines to try to make it through until the next job. As the 1930's wore on many men and women took to the hobo life, in many cases for the adventure and in many cases to escape home life and legal issues.

Lange did not see photography as an art form, but as documenting the lives and conditions of the suffering and each of her images tells its own story.

Her prints hang in many museums around the world. Dorothea Lange died in 1965.

Medium : 1 negative : nitrate

Created/Published : December, 1938

Creator : Dorothea Lange, photographer, 1895 - 1965

Part of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) - Office of War Information (OWI) Collection housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: fsa8b32870