Photography After the Flood

Abstract

Today, when we think of the hundreds of thousands of families who between 1935 and 1938 migrated to California after Dust Bowl conditions forced them off their farms in the Great Plains, we picture the men and women Dorothea Lange photographed during the years she worked for the New Deal's Farm Security Administration. Primarily a portrait photographer until 1932, Lange found the skills that she had developed for the studio allowed her to capture the worn and tired faces of the "Okie" families trying to begin their lives again in the midst of the Great Depression.