DOROTHEA LANGE | MIGRANT PEA PICKERS NEAR WESTLEY, CALIFORNIA

Acquired by the present owner, 2002

Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York, 1939), p. 135 

Sarah Hermanson Meister, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019), p. 167

'Intensive, large-scale, and highly seasonal agriculture have created in California the largest wage-earning class, proportionately, of any important agricultural state. They have produced a large, landless, and mobile proletariat.' (An American Exodus, p. 135) The full title of the variant negative in the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., is as follows: 'Migrant pea pickers from many states line up with their filled hampers on the edge of the field. They wait their turn for weighing. Near Westley, California.'

The first major Dorothea Lange retrospective was presented at The Museum of Modern Art in 1966. Before her death in October 1965, Lange had worked closely with John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography, to prepare the installation. The photographs were printed to Lange's careful specifications and according to the layout that she and Szarkowski together had designed. Two sets of photographs were printed in preparation for a never-realized travelling component of the exhibition; the Museum retained one set and the second was deaccessioned. The numbers on the reverse of the mount correspond to those from the checklist for the 1966 exhibition.