Towards Los Angeles
Photograph
1937 (made)
1937 (made)
| Artist/Maker | |
| Place of origin |
photographic print on paper
Object details
| Category | |
| Object type | |
| Title | Towards Los Angeles (assigned by artist) |
| Materials and techniques | photographic paper, photography |
| Brief description | Photograph by Dorothea Lange. 'Towards Los Angeles'. California. March 1937. |
| Physical description | photographic print on paper |
| Dimensions | |
| Gallery label | In the 1930s, severe droughts irreparably damaged farmland across America, intensifying a period of widespread economic uncertainty started by the Great Depression. Thousands of people abandoned their ruined land, moving to California. There they established makeshift homes in the desert or by roadsides, taking on precarious work like potato and cotton-picking. Produced for the Farm Security Administration, Lange’s photographs reflect on this migratory and unstable existence, and consider humanity’s dependent but uncertain relationship with the land for survival. |
| Credit line | Acquired from The Library of Congress, Washington D.C. in 1973. |
| Object history | Along with photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange worked for the American government’s Farm Security Administration programme during the Great Depression of the 1930's. The F.S.A. was set up to relieve poverty in rural areas but also involved photographing conditions faced by displaced farmers who had been hit by the Depression and by drought. Lange’s Californian Migrant Mother is one of the most widely known of all photographs; the tightly composed, highly concentrated composition has made it an icon of socially committed photography. |
| Place depicted | |
| Association | |
| Bibliographic reference | Taken from Departmental Circulation Register 1973 |
| Collection | |
| Accession number | CIRC.94-1973 |
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| Record created | June 30, 2009 |
| Record URL |
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