DOROTHEA LANGE | MIGRATORY CHILD AT END OF DAY IN BEAN PICKERS' CAMP NEAR WEST STAYTON, OREGON

PhotoWest Gallery, San Diego, 1990

Linda Gordon, ‘Dorothea Lange’s Oregon Photography: Assumptions Challenged,’ Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 110, no. 4, 2009, p. 594

Although best-known for her Depression-era work in California and the deep South, Lange made over 550 photographs in Oregon, the result of two trips to the Northwest in the summer and fall of 1939. Oregon’s economy was primarily agricultural and during the Depression an estimated 200,000 migrants poured into the state seeking a better life. The photograph offered here is from a series documenting the summer string bean harvest in Marion County, areas of which remain agricultural centers to this day. Lange’s caption reads in part, ‘The bean crop requires a large number of harvesters for a few weeks in August each year…Pickers are partly local people, partly from nearby portions of Oregon, who work seasonally only in the bean crop, and partly migrants who follow the crops from harvest to harvest…Most of the pickers camp on the land of the growers…There is less formality and freer more intimate relationship between small farmers and pickers than between the large growers and workers in California…1939 pickers’ wages are $1 per 100 lbs.’ (General Caption No. 46, filed 13 November 1939) 

At the time of this writing, no other early print of this image has been located nor is believed to have been offered at auction. The title and date for this image come from the caption card for nitrate negative 20583-C held by the Library of Congress.