Analyzing a Source Page 1Page 2
On a raw, soggy day in March 1936, Dorothea Lange was driving home to Berkeley after six weeks spent photographing migrant workers in California, New Mexico and Arizona. Her staff position at the Resettlement Administration (RA), an agency set up to help tenant farmers during the Depression, was tenuous: since there was no budget for a photographer, Lange had been hired as a clerk-stenographer, and she invoiced her film and travel expenses under "clerical supplies."

As Lange drove along the empty California highway that day, she noticed a sign that said Pea-Pickers Camp. Knowing that the pea crop had frozen, she debated for 20 miles before finally turning back. After pulling into the camp's muddy lane, Lange approached a female migrant worker, requested and got permission to photograph her and shot just five exposures. Lange's field notes read in part: "I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food."

Back home, Lange developed the images and, clutching the still-wet prints, told the editor of the San Francisco News that migrant workers were slowly starving to death in Nipomo, California.

–“Migrant Madonna,”
Rebecca Maksel,
2002

This excerpt is a from a
source.

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The events presented in this excerpt occurred in
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The
of this excerpt is that Dorothea Lange’s photos of Depression-era migrant workers helped expose their terrible living conditions.