On a bitter, damp day in March 1936, Dorothea Lange was driving home to Berkeley after spending six weeks photographing migrant workers in California, New Mexico, and Arizona. Her position on the staff at the Resettlement Administration (RA), an agency set up to help peasants during the Great Depression, was tenuous. Lange was employed as a clerk and a stenographer, as she had no budget for a photographer. Travel expenses under “office supplies”.
That day, as Lange was driving down an empty California highway, she noticed a sign that read “Pee Pickers Camp.” Knowing the pea crop was frozen, she insisted on her twenty miles before finally turning back. After driving into the camp’s muddy lane, Lange approached the migrant worker and asked permission to photograph her, and she took only five photographs. In her Lange field part of her notebook, she said, “I didn’t ask her name or her story. He told me he was 32 years old. She said they live off frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that have killed children. She had just sold car tires to buy groceries.”
Hence, At her home, Lange developed her images and, with the prints still wet, told San Francisco News editors that migrant workers in Nipomo, Calif., were slowly starving – “Immigrant Madonna.” “,
Rebecca Maxell
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