This photograph is from the series of images Lange made alongside Ansel Adams in Utah for a joint picture essay published in LIFE magazine in the fall of 1954. Entitled ‘Three Mormon Towns,’ the photographs were accompanied by text by Lange's son, Daniel Dixon. The present image is reproduced in LIFE on a page-spread devoted to the town of Toquerville. Dixon describes Toquerville as one of Utah’s ‘unchanging’ towns, that ‘does not have a bank or movie house, a motel or a café. It has a post office and two small grocery stores but no neon sign. . . Sheltered by the stately trees the pioneers planted and sustained by small, productive gardens, the people of Toquerville live quietly in a world the rest of the world nearly forgets.’ The caption for this photograph reads, ‘In the backyard the visitor finds an odd, sagging fence dividing the past from a fertile garden and again the other house amid poplars.’
The photographs in Dorothea Lange: The Family Collection 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.