Clouds, Utah

1935–1940

Five years on the road with Paul Taylor

For the next five years the couple travelled the California coast and the Midwest, documenting rural poverty, above all the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant labourers: Taylor interviewed people and gathered economic data while Lange made photographs and the accompanying records. They lived and worked from Berkeley for the rest of her life.

1936

Nipomo: aid is sent to the camp after her photographs

On her way home from weeks of shooting, Lange drove past a camp of pea-pickers at Nipomo, turned back and made five exposures of a woman with her children, Florence Owens Thompson. She showed the pictures to a San Francisco newspaper editor, who informed the federal authorities and published an article, and the government rushed aid to the camp to prevent starvation.

1936

Her photographs in Steinbeck’s “The Harvest Gypsies”

Twenty-two photographs Lange had made for the FSA were included in John Steinbeck’s “The Harvest Gypsies” when it was first published in The San Francisco News in 1936.

1939

The book “An American Exodus” with Paul Taylor

Lange and her husband, the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, were the authors of the book “An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion” (first published in 1939).

1940

Her photographs inspire the film “The Grapes of Wrath”

Lange’s photographs served as an inspiration for the 1940 film adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath”.