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On U.S. 99. Near Brawley, Imperial County. Homeless family of seven, walking the highway from Phoenix, Arizona, where they picked cotton. Bound for San Diego, where the father hopes to get on the relief because he once lived there
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On U.S. 99. Near Brawley, Imperial County. Homeless family of seven, walking the highway from Phoenix, Arizona, where they picked cotton. Bound for San Diego, where the father hopes to get on the relief because he once lived there
On U.S. 99. Near Brawley, Imperial County. Homeless mother and youngest child of seven walking the highway from Phoenix, Arizona where they picked cotton. Bound for San Diego, where the father hopes to get on relief "because he once lived there."
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Camped on the flat. Family with five children, left their home in Texas in September 1938. They picked their way across the country in Texas and Arizona cotton. They had just entered California the night before. Near Holtville, Imperial County, California
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Young family, penniless, hitchhiking on U.S. Highway 99 in California. The father, twenty-four, and the mother, seventeen, came from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Early in 1935, their baby was born in the Imperial Valley, California, where they were working as field laborers
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On U.S. 99. Near Brawley, Imperial County. Homeless family of seven, walking the highway from Phoenix, Arizona, where they picked cotton. Bound for San Diego, where the father hopes to get on the relief because he once lived there
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 2392.
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."