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Highway City, California, near Fresno. See general caption. Family from Oklahoma; have been in California for six years, have been migratory workers now on Works Progress Administration (WPA) from which they may be cut off at the opening of the 1939 harvest. Their house represents one of many similar structures, which they are attempting to construct by their own efforts on poor land, for which they are paying a few dollars a month out of the WPA budget. Their light bill is two dollars a month. Water bill one dollar a month, kerosene for cooking five dollars per month, approximately. They own a 1929 Ford. "The cheapest thing for the government to do would be to put people like me on enough land to make a living on. You can't tell me anything about running around with the fruit, I know that deal. You are lucky if you make enough to get home. I'm not a kickin', I'm being tuk care of, but if I should live to be hundred this way I'm not getting ahead noways."

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Highway City, California, near Fresno. See general caption. Family from Oklahoma; have been in California for six years, have been migratory workers now on Works Progress Administration (WPA) from which they may be cut off at the opening of the 1939 harvest. Their house represents one of many similar structures, which they are attempting to construct by their own efforts on poor land, for which they are paying a few dollars a month out of the WPA budget. Their light bill is two dollars a month. Water bill one dollar a month, kerosene for cooking five dollars per month, approximately. They own a 1929 Ford. "The cheapest thing for the government to do would be to put people like me on enough land to make a living on. You can't tell me anything about running around with the fruit, I know that deal. You are lucky if you make enough to get home. I'm not a kickin', I'm being tuk care of, but if I should live to be hundred this way I'm not getting ahead noways."

description

Summary

Title and other information from caption card.
Transfer; United States. Office of War Information. Overseas Picture Division. Washington Division; 1944.
More information about the FSA/OWI Collection is available at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.fsaowi
Temp. note: usf34batch2
Film copy on SIS roll 28, frame 193.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Dorothea Lange contracted polio as a young girl. She learned professional photography skills while working in New York in her early 20s, and then landed in San Francisco where she ran a portrait business catering to the city's wealthy elite. Her second husband, Paul Taylor, helped her to get out into the fields with the destitute pickers, who she'd treat like portrait subjects with empathy and identification with her subjects. When the Depression hit, she captured crowded breadlines. In the late 1930s Dorothea Lange had been hired by the photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration - to photograph Dust Bowl refugees escaped into California from the Midwest and her images went far beyond bureaucratic reportage. A skilled portraitist, Lange might not have been able to change government policies, but her images for the FSA were picked up by newspapers across the country. John Steinbeck used them for inspiration in his 1939 Dust Bowl tale "The Grapes of Wrath."

date_range

Date

01/01/1939
place

Location

california
create

Source

Library of Congress
copyright

Copyright info

No known restrictions. For information, see U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html

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