DOROTHEA LANGE | MOTHER AND BABY OF FAMILY ON THE ROAD, TULELAKE, SISKIYOU COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

PhotoWest Gallery, San Diego, 1990

Paul S. Taylor, Dorothea Lange: Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1936-1939 (Glencoe, 1980), 6-55

Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field (Chicago, 2008), pl. 103

Dorothea Lange: The Crucial Years, 1930-1946 (Madrid, 2009), p. 58

The Bitter Years: Edward Steichen and The Farm Security Administration Photographs (New York, 2012), p. 180

Variants:

Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime (Millerton, 1982), p. 117

Thomas Weston Fels, Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1992), cover and p. 151

Mark Durden, Dorothea Lange 55 (London, 2001), p. 103

Stu Cohen, The Likes of Us: America in the Eyes of the FSA (Boston, 2007), pp. 80-1

Pierre Borhan, Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer (Boston, 2002), cover and p. 153

Michael Lesy, Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1943-1959 (New York, 2002), p. 350

Dorothea Lange’s Mother and Baby of Family on the Road is startling in its intimacy. A salt-of-the-earth Madonna and Child, it is the most memorable in a series of images of the same family made in September 1939 in Tulelake, California, a small city in Northeastern Siskiyou County known for its potato and alfalfa crops. The potato harvest lasts but a few months from September through October, but in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the chance to get a month or even a day of low wages lured thousands of desperate migrant workers and their families. In Lange’s other photographs of this family, we see their jalopy, a crude traveling home laden with their possessions. 

The immediacy of Mother and Baby of Family on the Road is due in part to Lange's talent for establishing trust with her subjects. Unlike many of her FSA contemporaries, Lange strove to connect with her subjects, engaging them in active conversation and often incorporating their own words into her captions. In the present image, Lange catches the mother seemingly mid-sentence. The small child stares defiantly at the camera, ready to nurse from the Coca Cola bottle at hand. Of this image, Lange wrote:

'The car is parked outside the Employment Office. The family have just arrived, before opening of the potato season. They have been on the road for one month—have sick baby.

The father worked on W.P.A. in South Dakota, “till that played out.” Three children, oldest about five. About to camp on a site without water of sanitation. They have no tent. “Been trying to get one some way.”

Mother says, of father, “What he really likes to do is to milk cows. He can do a little of everything, but that’s what he likes.”

Father washed the baby’s face with edge of blanket dampened from canteen for the photographs.'

(General Caption No. 65)

At the time of this writing, it is believed that no other print of this image has been offered at auction.