Oklahoma drought refugees near Visalia, California, 1935
Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1940s
9 1/2 × 7 3/4 in
August 8, 2022
Dorothea Lange took this photograph of a mother and child living out of a farm truck in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley of California, a region where a great number of refugees sought work during the Great Depression after fleeing the Dust Bowl storms and drought conditions on the Great Planes. The migrant workers faced discriminatory and abusive labor practices, living next to irrigation ditches as they worked for starvation wages—if they could find work at all. Lange spent 1935 traveling California with her husband Paul Taylor, documenting the abject poverty that was being suffered by sharecroppers and migrant farm laborers. They began their work for the California State Emergency Relief Administration which, in the summer of 1935, was transferred to what would become President Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency whose photography program sought to inspire compassion in the public by putting a human face on rural poverty.
A print of this photograph was featured in MoMA’s 1966 career retrospective of Lange’s work. Lange spent the last year of her life working closely with MoMA curator John Szarkowki on the selections and design for that exhibition, crafting a summation of her singular achievement as a socially conscious photojournalist.
