Dorothea Lange never out of vogue, now her famous black and white images are in color bringing the real events closer to the observer, giving you a more realistic view of how things were during the migration to California 1935-1939. 


This unique 126 page book is packed with introductory facts about Dorothea Lange, the FSA, the dust bowl, Woody Guthrie, the displaced migrants of the 1930’s and how it all ended. With over 70 colored images of her famous photographs, this book makes a very interesting and thought provoking realization of how things really might have been in color, making this book a must read.


The Farm Security Administration...

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created in the Department of Agriculture in 1937. The FSA and its predecessor, the Resettlement Administration (RA), created in 1935, were New Deal programs designed to assist poor farmers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression....


Dorothea Lange...

Dorothea Lange was a photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary photography.
During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange’s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer.....


The Migrant Experience...

A complex set of interacting forces both economic and ecological brought the migrant workers documented in this ethnographic collection to California. Following World War I, a recession led to a drop in the market price of farm crops and caused Great Plains farmers to increase their productivity through mechanization and the cultivation of more land....


The Dust Bowl...

The Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world. Three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states, almost all to the West. But the Dust Bowl drought was not meteorologically extreme by the standards of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries....


Woody Guthrie's Involvement in the Dust Bowl...

While Woody may not have experienced the Dust Bowl in the same way that other Refugees did, he did have a very difficult childhood full of trials which were not to subside in his adult life. In so far as the Dust Bowl Refugee seeks refuge from trials, Woody is the real thing....


Anti-Okie Hysteria Explodes...

When the federal government discontinued cash aid to transients in 1935, Californians began to worry about the wave of indigent migrants. The panic was particularly fierce in Los Angeles. In February 1936, Police Chief James Davis dispatched an “expeditionary force” of 150 police officers to points along the border with orders to enforce a “bum blockade.” Mayor Frank Shaw defended the legality of the blockade, declaring that Los Angeles “would not be the dumping ground of charity seekers.”...


The times they are a-Changin'

Although relatively few Americans paid attention to the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants during the early ’30s, a small group of reformers was documenting the problems in the fields and squatters’ camps. Two, in particular, brought the issue to national attention. One was a photographer, named Dorothea Lange, whom the Resettlement Administration had hired to document the lives of farm workers. The San Francisco News published Lange’s photographs in 1936 under the headline, “Ragged Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live In Squalor.” Another of her photos published later that year—the “Migrant Mother” became one of the most famous photographs of American history...