Dorothea Lange 1895-1965

a group of 32 photographs of Migrant Farm Workers in California and the West,  including ‘Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California’; ‘Stalled in the Desert, Facing a Future in California’; '"Give us this Day our Daily Bread,”  Sunday School for Migrant Children,' and many others taken for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration, mounted to thick buff-colored or slick white board, 10 titled by the photographer in ink, 9 captioned in an unidentified calligraphic hand, and 10 with typed caption labels on the mounts, one with the photographer’s notations in pencil and several others annotated in an unidentified hand in ink on the reverse, 1935-37 (32 photographs on 30 mounts)

Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus (New York, 1939), p. 108

John Szarkowski, Dorothea Lange (The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), p. 25

Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra Phillips, and John Szarkowski, Dorothea Lange, American Photographs (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994), plates 11, 35, and 43; and fig. 41, p. 69

Therese Thau Heyman, Celebrating a Collection: The Work of Dorothea Lange (The Oakland Museum, 1978), p. 61

Keith F. Davis, The Photographs of Dorothea Lange (Hallmark Cards, Inc., 1995), p. 45

Dorothea Lange, Photographs of a Lifetime (Millerton, 1982), pp. 77 and 112

Pierre Borhan, The Heart and Mind of a Photographer (Boston, 2002), pp. 133, 140 and 191

Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In this Proud Land, America 1935-1943 as Seen in the F.S.A. Photographs (Greenwich, 1973),  pp. 18 and 87

Mark Durden, Dorothea Lange 55 (London, 2001), pp. 39 and 61

Dorothea Lange, The Human Face (Paris, 1998), p. 99

This group of primarily large-format photographs, including Dorothea Lange’s most famous image, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, was intended for exhibition.  In the 1930s and 1940s, the Farm Security Administration made sets of the images produced under its auspices available to schools, libraries, and civic organizations.  Two groups of similar photographs, by Lange and other photographers employed by the Resettlement and Farm Security Administrations, were offered in these rooms on 18 April 1997 (Lot 170) and 27 April 2005 (Lot 48).  The group offered here is notable for the large number of images titled by Lange herself.  This suggests that these prints were made by Lange, rather than by the F.S.A. labs in Washington, D.C.     

These photographs belong to the descendants of Bill Hendrie, the Research and Development Manager at the San Jose, California, Chamber of Commerce in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Hendrie, who had been born in Oklahoma and moved to California in the 1950s, discovered these photographs in a trash area in the Chamber of Commerce building during this time.  Realizing that they were about to be discarded, he rescued the prints and kept them for his family.