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An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion
by Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor

In his essay in The Heart and Mind of a Photographer, A.D. Coleman focuses exclusively on An American Exodus. He says that its layout and design presage many of the design elements we see today on the web, and that documentary photographers working today could do well to find a facsimile of the first edition and examine it in depth.

Well, the Seattle Public Library has a copy on their reference shelves. During Lange’s lifetime, there was only the one edition. There have been a couple facsimile reprints of the first edition, sometimes with new accompanying essays. After Lange died, Paul Schuster Taylor produced a second edition, but it was revised and reorganized. It’s in the first edition (or facsimile reproductions) that we see their statement in its most clear and direct form.

It was not the first work to combine photos and text about the Depression and Dust Bowl. There had been Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by James Agee and photos by Walker Evans; and You Have Seen Their Faces, with text by Erskine Caldwell and photos by Margaret Bourke-White. But this was the first to feature actual direct quotes from the subjects photographed, and deep socioeconomic analysis from Paul Taylor.

I felt this was the distilled essence of Lange’s photography. That, although not the best reproductions of her work (given 1930s printing technology vs. today’s), this was the purest form of her work I’d seen. The book itself does indeed presage design techniques now common, and I agree with A.D. Coleman that it’s worth studying. Unfortunately, I got so wrapped up in it I forgot to take notes.

The endpapers are a stream of quotes from people they interviewed, printed in all caps, without attribution. They flow across the endpapers in a way that reminds me of Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger. Each chapter focuses on a different region, working westward. The chapters start out with photos and brief captions, followed by an analysis from Paul Taylor. Another element distinguishing “An American Exodus” is their use of newspaper facsimiles and reprints. A newspaper ad extolling the depth and fertility of the soil of the Oklahoma panhandle, saying the farmer could be living a life of ease in just a few short years, is followed by a photograph of the dustbowl captioned simply “Thirteen years later.”

I got a better sense of the interplay of elements in the catastrophe from Taylor’s words than I had from other reading I’ve done about the dust bowl (admittedly, not very much). It wasn’t just the drought, it wasn’t just the mechanization of farming from mule to tractor. Also involved were farmers taking payments from the government for crop reduction, part of which should have gone to their tenants and sharecroppers. Instead, most farmers used the money to buy tractors and kick the sharecroppers and tenants off the land.

Tractored out, Childress County Texas, June 1938
Photo by Dorothea Lange

All the farmers moved gradually west, until they wound up in the central valley of California. Here they were met by large farms that were already industrial, already mechanized except for the planting and harvesting. When labor was needed, it was needed by the thousands — Lange and Taylor reproduce an ad saying “1000s of cotton pickers needed.” The farms there had already been using Philipino, Japanese, and Mexican migrant labor for decades. Now they were flooded by displaced white people as well.

Paul Schuster Taylor made a graphic representation of the migrant labor flow: An outline map of the US, the tributaries of the flow start further to the north and east than I had expected them to. But they build across the south, as the streams unite through Texas and Oklahoma, until they become a vast sideways river dumping into California. The sudden influx of labor drove down the already near-starvation wages.

And what happened to the migrants after the harvest? They had to choose between food and gas money. The car was necessary to follow the work, but there was never enough money for food and car maintenance both. If the crop failed, or if they arrived too late for a place, they were stuck.

The final chapter of the book makes suggestions for reform, calls for action. But you know, I couldn’t read it. I was already pretty wrung out by the sustained reading of the previous chapters, and I thought that reading the suggestions made in 1939, ignored completely or only half-executed, would have been too much.

NOTE: Since I’m working without Coleman’s essay at hand for reference, I may have either misquoted or unintentionally plagiarized. My apologies.

Here’s another article on An American Exodus, from the University of Virginia’s American Studies program. And here is a contemporary review of the book, by Paul Strand.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, with essays by Sandra S. Phillips, John Szarkowski, and Therese Thau Heyman
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro
Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer by Pierre Borhan, with essays by A.D. Coleman, Ralph Gibson, and Sam Stourdze

You've seen work by Dorothea Lange, even if you don't recognize the name immediately.

She was born in 1895. At 7, she had polio, which left her with a lifelong limp. At 12, her father abandoned her family. At 18, she said she wanted to be a photographer before she'd even picked up a camera. At 19, she apprenticed herself to New York photographers, and took some classes with, among others, Clarence H. White. At 22, she set off on a round-the-world trip with a girlfriend, but they got robbed in San Francisco. She lived in the Bay Area the rest her life.

She got a job in a processing lab, but soon set up her own studio, doing portraits of San Francisco's well heeled and Bohemians. Her work from this period is not particularly memorable. In the early 1930s, her studio work fell off, and she took to the streets to photograph the people she found there. Her accounts of this decision vary. She said sometimes that seeing the people on the streets from her studio window, during the early days of the depression, compelled her to leave the studio. In other interviews, she said that during a thunderstorm, the idea came to her that she should work only with people, whether they could pay or not.

Some of the early photographs were seen by Paul Taylor, an economist studying land-use and farm migration issues. He was apt to use snapshots to illustrate his work, as much as tables and graphs. When he was hired by the government, he asked that Dorothea Lange also be hired as the photographer. This lead to the most fruitful collaboration of either career. She was soon hired by the Farm Services Administration, and spent months at a stretch driving around California and the west, documenting the plight of the displaced farmer and migrant worker.

All of her best known work stems from the years she worked for the FSA, circa 1935-1939. This is where the interpersonal skills she developed as a portraitist came to the fore. Her work is much more personal and connected to the subject than that of the other FSA photographers.


Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940. Resting at cotton wagon before returning to work in the field. He has been picking cotton all day.
A good picker earns about two dollars a day working, at this time of the year, about ten hours.


A Child and Her Mother, FSA Clients. Yakima Valley, near Wapato, Washington, August, 1939


Daughter of migrant Tennessee coal miner. Living in American River camp near Sacramento, California

Migrant Mother almost didn't happen. When Lange took those pictures, she was returning from a month in the field. She said that she drove past the camp at first, but something compelled her to return. The publication of Migrant Mother electrified the country, and lead to an outpouring of aid. And it is a very compelling image.


Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California

The children close, but turned away shyly. The concern and the hand raised to her face. The closeness of the framing, so that everything else is removed but this very moment. This was the final of six frames shot by Lange, a process that with her equipment (a 4x5 Graflex) would have taken several minutes. It has echoes of Christian madonna and child imagery.

The strength of the image is part of why it's remembered so well today, and still used as an icon of poverty and survival. It's one of the most famous (if not the most famous) photographs of the 20th century.

Of three books, Impounded has the best writing, and The Heart and Mind has the best photographic reproduction, spanning all of her career.

The two essays in Impounded concern Lange's documentation of the internment, and the internment itself. It was more horrific than I realized. Whatever standing the people had, whatever generation they were (fourth, fifth, and more), however much money or property they had or business they owned -- it was all stolen from them. The theft amounted to several billion dollars in today's money. Lange spent months working on the documentation, driving all around California, up into Washington and Oregon. The same empathy that connected her to the displaced farmworkers connected her to the internees. That's why the photos were never published during the war.

The Heart and Mind has photos from her early portrait studio days, through the depression era for which she is most famous, and up into the late 50s. There was a period of about ten years she was unable to work due to illness, but in the late 1950s she traveled with Paul Taylor to Vietnam, SE Asia, Ireland, and other places. These photos, too, show the same depth of connection to her subject as all her photography does. I also liked the essay by A.D. Coleman, "Dust in the Wind: The Legacy of Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor's An American Exodus," in which he makes the claim that the design and content of An American Exodus presages the way information is presented on the web, and that photographers and designers could do well to read it today.