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 she took this picture of the two laborers, Memphis, Tennessee had hundreds of black laborers who would congregate every morning at daylight in hopes of chopping cotton on a plantation. Reduced cotton acreage made employment scarce for this class of seasonal worker in all the towns. The following quote is attributed to one of the men: "You can't live the commonest way on six bits a day. Not alone nor no way. A man like me can't get no foothold. It's a mighty tough old go. The people here in the morning are hungry, raggedy, but they don't make no hungry march." (Six bits is 75 cents)

Because of the massive government effort to bring stability to the agricultural economy in the United States, significant steps were taken to reduce the acreage of commodities like cotton with the unintended consequence of creating large bodies of the unemployed. This was the beginning of farm subsidy legislation that continues to be paid to farmers and large corporations who buy farm land for investment.

Dorothea Lange's images hang in many museums around the world. Lange died in 1965.

Medium : 1 negative : nitrate

Created/Published : June, 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 #: cph8b32356