This photograph is reproduced in the first chapter of An American Exodus, the seminal pictorial study of the Depression’s impact by Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor. Entitled Old South, this chapter focuses on the plight of poor tenant farmers who worked land that was steadily becoming depleted. The dusty quality of the soil visible in this picture, and the scant and uneven crops, provide an eloquent encapsulation of this situation. In the book, this image is paired with a quote from sociologist Rupert B. Vance: ‘The South is poor, the land is poor, the only crop is cotton, the houses are without paint, weeds crowd up to the door, the tenants are ill-clad.’
Page spread from Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, pp. 12-13
Paul Taylor summed up the situation in is text for the chapter: ‘The rural problems of the lower strata in the South are deeply rooted in the past. They have developed in the society created by cotton. They focus largely on masses of poor propertyless workers, white and black, using simple methods of production in the fields, with little opportunity to rise.’
The photographs in Dorothea Lange: The Family Collection, Part Two were in the photographer’s collection at the time of her death and thenceforth passed to her descendants. The images represent the entirety of Lange’s career as one of the foremost documentary photographers of the 20th century, from work made before her engagement with the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration, in the 1930s, to the travel photography that absorbed her in her final years, as well as more personal images of her family. Each print bears a Family Collection stamp on the reverse.
Provenance
Collection of Dorothea Lange By descent to the present owners
Literature
Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, p. 13 (variant cropping)