Lange and Taylor were the first to begin photographing and interviewing the Dust Bowl migrants arriving in California. Taylor was working for the California State Emergency Relief Administration, one of Roosevelt’s early New Deal agencies, and he invited Lange to join the team. She was hired as a “typist” because the administration’s payroll had no provisions for a “documentary photographer.” I presume this would have been handled differently for a man. But Lange was in fact there to take photographs, while Taylor talked to people and took field notes. They documented the influx of rattle-trap jalopies, the stunned faces of the newly arrived families, the temporary tent settlements. The caption of a photograph that Lange took in Bakersfield, California, of a sharecropper family with their kids and belongings in tow reads, “We got blowed out in Oklahoma.”
Lange and Taylor put together a report about migratory labor that helped secure federal funding for temporary migratory camps to house displaced farm workers. Lange’s photographs were also instrumental in the creation of the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal agency put together in 1937 as a response to the agricultural devastation of the Dust Bowl. After seeing Lange’s photos of the camps, Roy Stryker, the head of the Historical Section, hired a group of young photographers—Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein among them—who over the next few years produced a public archive of more than 80,000 photographs of the Depression.
Lange and Taylor continued to develop and perfect their method: taking photographs, interviewing, and logging field notes in a shared journal that later helped them put their work together coherently. Their respective words and photographs were not two separate projects later assembled artificially, but rather grew together, intricately woven. The culmination of their work from the 1930s was an astonishing book, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939)—now almost impossible to find—which assembles a narrative of human struggle against the machinery of capitalism, always swallowing labor in order to produce fortunes for the few and destitution for the many.
The book documents lives shattered by the cotton industry, rural poverty, migration to urban centers, depletion of natural resources, mechanization—and also the absurdity of it all, encapsulated in a photograph of a barbed-wire fence separating two identical expanses of dusty emptiness. The book includes introductory essays by Taylor, photographs by Lange, and captions, most of them direct quotes—fragments of conversations—from the people they approached:
There’s lots of ways to break a man down… We’re trying not to, but we’ll be in California yet… If you die, you’re dead—that’s all. The people ain’t got no say a comin’.
“How do you tell others about what you think is worth telling, that you have either discovered, or uncovered, or learned…and that you think is meaningful,” Lange asks the camera in the film footage from 1963—“not moral, but meaningful?” That is, perhaps, both the most basic and complex question in the creative process: How do we organize the chaos of our individual experience into a narrative that carries collective meaning? Perhaps taking a series of photographs is similar to the process of taking notes for a novel or an essay. The hardest part comes later, when those notes have to be revised—most discarded, some kept—and then assembled into a larger narrative. And when getting that larger narrative right directly affects the people whose lives and struggles you are documenting, as was the case with Lange’s work, the responsibility is not only aesthetic but also political.