Japanese awaiting Internment by Dorothea Lange, 1942
“The photos give a preview of her work commissioned by the federal War Relocation Authority agency in 1942…”
SEE MORE: https://bit.ly/36ZlBQN
PETER STACKPOLE
Workers on the company boat, Golden Gate Bridge construction, 1935 by Peter Stackpole
(photo from an original print. Much of Mr. Stackpole’s work was lost in a 1991 fire)
HIGH SCHOOL BEACH
High School Beach, Venice, California, 1949 by Max Yavno
Max Yavno worked as a Wall Street messenger while attending City College of New York at night. He attended the graduate school of political economics at Columbia University and worked in the Stock Exchange before becoming a social worker in 1935. He did photography for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1942. He was president of the Photo League in 1938 and 1939. Yavno was in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1945, after which he moved to San Francisco and began specializing in urban-landscape photography.
He was one of several post war photographers who lived and worked in what became a new culture, the Southern California middle class leisure car culture.
ROGER MINNICK: SOUTHLAND
Roger Minnick is the voice and the heart of Southern California, especially in the 1970s and 80s. This was the California that the rest of the USA flocked to. Surfin’ USA!
Minnick always has had his finger on the pulse of the state. He just “gets it.”
For more work by the incredible Minnick, see: https://www.rogerminick.com/southland
NO NET AMERICA
Migrant family on highway, California, 1937
Photograph by Dorothea Lange
Extended Caption: California at Last: Example of self-resettlement in California. Oklahoma farm family on highway between Blythe and Indio. Forced by the drought of 1936 to abandon their farm, they set out with their children to drive to California. Picking cotton in Arizona for a day or two at a time gave them enough for food and gas to continue. On this day, they were within a day’s travel of their destination, Bakersfield, California. Their car had broken down en route and was abandoned.
LANGE AND HER TRANSCRIBED TEXT
“Toward Los Angeles.”California,
March 1937 by Dorothea Lange for FSA
“Next Time Try The Train– Relax.”
Lange captioned this with the walkers own words: “Well– give me the fare and I will, buddy. We ain’t walkin’ for our health…”
IMPERIAL VALLEY, 1935
Man in Fields, Imperial Valley,
by Dorothea Lange (OMCA)
MIGRATION 30s STYLE
Ten Children, March 1937, by Dorothea Lange,
for the RA (courtesy of OMCA)
Text by Bruce Berman
Migrants looking for work goes back the very beginning of America, from the English/Europeans at Jamestown and beyond. One could arguably say that “Native Americans” descended from migrants from China, coming across the Bering land bridge.
In Lange’s era, as the economic Depression of the 1930s deepened and the ecological disasters of drought and erosion progressed there was a massive infra-country migration, primarily from the Great Plains and Texas/Oklahoma, mostly heading west to California.
This migration was heavily documented by the FSA and by others.