Dorothea Lange

the photographer's Resettlement Administration credit stamp and the Resettlement Administration number in an unidentified hand in pencil (faint) on the reverse, hinged to a modern mount, matted, 1937

Acquired by the present owner from PhotoWest Gallery, San Diego, 1991

Other prints of this image:

Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (New York, 1938), p. 5.

Dorothea Lange (The Museum of Modern Art, 1966, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 32

Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (New York, 1978), p. 218

Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips, and John Szarkowski, Dorothea Lange: American Photographs (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 46

Ben Maddow, Faces: A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography (Boston, 1977), pp. 324-5

Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pl. 29

James C. Anderson, ed., Roy Stryker: The Humane Propagandist, Photographic Archives (University of Louisville, 1977), p. 26

Andrea Fisher, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women (London, 1987), pp. 22 and 136

This early print, slightly warm-toned and on medium-weight paper with a semi-glossy surface, is in generally excellent condition. The lower corners are bumped. In raking light, tiny deposits of original retouching are visible, as well as several small scratches and indentations not breaking the emulsion. The Resettlement Administration stamp indicates that the print was made in 1937, earlier during the same year that the agency was re-named the Farm Security Administration.
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Six Tenant Farmers without Farms, Goodlet, Hardeman County, Texas, shows six young farmers who had lost their livelihood when tractor cultivation came to the land they had worked for years.  At the time of Lange's photograph, all were living on welfare and, because they could not afford the Texas poll tax, were no longer able to vote.  The photograph is one of multiple studies made by Lange of these same men, four of which are reproduced in Milton Meltzer's Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (pp. 218-19).  A cropped version of the present image, as well as a second view of the men seated on the ground, was published in Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor's defining volume of that era, An American Exodus.

 In an early version of her caption for the picture, Lange described the scene:

'On a Sunday morning in June 1937 we drove across the Low Plains of north Texas and the Panhandle on US Highway 370 . . . Over a dirt road a couple of miles north and a mile east.  We knocked at the screen door and waited.  The inner door opened and seven men filed silently onto the porch.  We passed our credentials through the screen and waited as every man took the card and read.  Then they slowly began to talk' (quoted in Jefferson Hunter, Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts, pp. 91-92). 

The year 1937 was a bad year for tenant farmers.  Across the South and throughout Texas and Oklahoma, the mechanization of agriculture was forcing thousands of people off the land, causing a vast migration westward.  Mechanical pickers were replacing sharecroppers on cotton plantations; tractors and four-row cultivators were the twentieth-century's answer to the centuries-old horse and plow.   Paul Schuster Taylor believed that the new machines were beginning to wreak far more change on the Plains than the recent years of drought.  In many of Lange's photographs, among them her well-known 'Tractored Out,' the furrows left by tractors stretch into a distance that seems infinite.

The print of Six Tenant Farmers without Farms offered here exemplifies the best of Lange's photography: compassion without pity, reportage without exaggeration or melodrama.  This same approach would characterize Lange and Taylor's collaborative volume, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, the culmination of five years' work in the field.  Published in 1939, the book was informed by the illustrated reports Lange and Taylor had sent to Washington on a regular basis, and by the words of the displaced and dispossessed.   It is the personal voice of the book, with its captions—anecdotes and opinions expressed directly by the subjects—and simple descriptions, that makes it effective in a way that other books of the period are not.

The caption for this photograph in An American Exodus reads as follows:

'ALL DISPLACED TENANT FARMERS.  THE OLDEST 33.

 'All native Americans, none able to vote because of Texas poll tax.  All on WPA.  They support an average of four persons each on $22.80 a month.

            '"Where we gonna go?"

            '"How we gonna get there?"

            '"What we gonna do?"

            '"Who we gonna fight?"

            '"If we fight, what we gotta whip?"

                               'North Texas, Sunday morning, June 1937'

In the past two decades, only one other print of the Six Tenant Farmers offered here has appeared at auction in these rooms: a print made by James Welcher in 1965 for Lange's 1966 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art (23 April 1994, Photographs from The Museum of Modern Art, Sale 6552, Lot 226).