As one of the greatest photographers of pre-War America, Dorothea Lange’s images of the Great Depression have been widely lauded as exceptionally humane. Along with Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott and Arthur Rothstein, among others, Lange was tasked with depicting the plight of rural America. In 1940, shortly after her tenure at the Farm Security Administration, Lange was appointed Head Photographer for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, a year-long stint during which she traveled across California and Arizona, as seen in the current lot. Coinciding with the rise in print publications, the photographs were meant to bring to the collective American consciousness such individuals as migrant workers, sharecroppers, farmers and field laborers, whose hardship was largely unknown to the American public. Lange’s portraits, such as the current lot, became emblematic of a larger epidemic. The picker exposes the palm of his hand to the camera, exposing endless grooves that are undoubtedly the result of heavy manual labor. Like many of Lange’s most poignant works, Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, is not a portrait of an individual, but of an era.