San Joaquin Valley, California

1933

Leaves the studio for the streets

For fifteen years her portrait studio supported her family, with San Francisco’s social elite as her sitters; but during the Great Depression Lange left the studio for the streets and roads of California to document the lives of the unemployed and the homeless, and found her calling as a documentary photographer.

1935

Married: Paul Schuster Taylor

28 October 1935

Divorce from Maynard Dixon

Lange and Dixon divorced on 28 October 1935, and on 6 December she married Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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.