Similar
Near Shafter, California. Potatoes are dug by machines and strewn on the ground as the digger goes down the rows. The picker puts the potatoes into sacks suspended from their waist between their knees. The sacks are loaded onto the field trucks and taken to the sheds for sorting and grading. Potato pickers earned forty cents an hour in 1937
Topping sugar beets, near Fisher, Minnesota
Farmers during Great Depression: A black and white photo of a man in a field.
A black and white photo of a group of people in a field, New Jersey. Farm Security Administration photograph
A black and white photo of people in a field. Farmers during Great Depression
A black and white photo of a man on a horse drawn cart. FSA/OWI Photograph.
Ganson truck garden, near Kearney, Buffalo County, Nebraska.
A couple of people that are standing in a field, Farm security administration, 1935
Related
Near Shafter, California. Potatoes are dug by machines and strewn on the ground as the digger goes down the rows. The picker puts the potatoes into sacks suspended from their waist between their knees. The sacks are loaded onto the field trucks and taken to the sheds for sorting and grading. Potato pickers earned forty cents an hour in 1937
Truck being loaded as it goes down the rows. The pickers pick the potatoes from the ground and put them in sack which is suspended from their waist between their knees after the machine has dug them from the ground. This work requires endurance but no special skill. 1937 wages: forty cents an hour. Shafter, California
Mechanical potato digger in the field. Shafter, California
Truck being loaded as it goes down the rows. The pickers pick the potatoes from the ground and put them in sack which is suspended from their waist between their knees after the machine has dug them from the ground. This work requires endurance but no special skill. 1937 wages: forty cents an hour. Shafter, California
Truckloads of potatoes in front of sorting, grading and bagging sheds. From here they are shipped to all parts of the country. Gilcrest, Colorado
Truckloads of potatoes in front of sorting, grading, and bagging sheds. From here they are shipped to all parts of the country. Gilcrest, Colorado
Farmers with their trucks waiting outside a starch factory in Fort Kent, Maine. Many of them have been there for over twenty-four hours waiting for their potatoes to be graded and weighed
Mechanical potato digger in the field. Shafter, California
Small potatoes, dirt, sticks, etc., drop through the bars to ground below as potatoes are cleaned, graded and sacked at the cellar. Klamath County, Oregon
Near Shafter, California. Potatoes are dug by machines and strewn on the ground as the digger goes down the rows. The picker puts the potatoes into sacks suspended from their waist between their knees. The sacks are loaded onto the field trucks and taken to the sheds for sorting and grading. Potato pickers earned forty cents an hour in 1937
Summary
Title and other information from caption card.
Transfer; United States. Office of War Information. Overseas Picture Division. Washington Division; 1944.
More information about the FSA/OWI Collection is available at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.fsaowi
Temp. note: usf34batch2
Film copy on SIS roll 27, frame 1020.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Dorothea Lange contracted polio as a young girl. She learned professional photography skills while working in New York in her early 20s, and then landed in San Francisco where she ran a portrait business catering to the city's wealthy elite. Her second husband, Paul Taylor, helped her to get out into the fields with the destitute pickers, who she'd treat like portrait subjects with empathy and identification with her subjects. When the Depression hit, she captured crowded breadlines. In the late 1930s Dorothea Lange had been hired by the photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration - to photograph Dust Bowl refugees escaped into California from the Midwest and her images went far beyond bureaucratic reportage. A skilled portraitist, Lange might not have been able to change government policies, but her images for the FSA were picked up by newspapers across the country. John Steinbeck used them for inspiration in his 1939 Dust Bowl tale "The Grapes of Wrath."