Dorothea Lange in Morrow County
A 20th Century Master In Morrow County
As she rose to the peak of her creative powers, Dorothea Lange visited Irrigon in 1939 on a trip through Oregon documenting the Great Depression for FDR
Working in the crisp fall air, a farmer and his wife caught Dorothea Lange’s eye as they dug sweet potatoes along the Columbia River at Irrigon in October 1939.
As part of the legendary stable of photographers at the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal, Lange spent much of the 1930s capturing the suffering and dignity of those who survived the Great Depression.
Along with Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn and Carl Mydans were among the most famous photographers fostered by the FSA program. (Many later worked for Life magazine.)
They were sent out to document conditions nationwide and help build public support for government improvement programs. They documented both the New Deal programs that succeeded and those that failed.
Lange’s “Migrant Mother” photograph, taken in 1936 in California, is one of the most reproduced photographs in history.
In 1939, Lange traveled through the Willamette Valley and Josephine, Klamath and Malheur counties, taking hundreds of photographs.
She also spent time along the Columbia River and in Morrow County during October of that year, taking the photos displayed on these pages.
A book and a photo exhibition brought Lange’s Oregon work to light for a new generation. Anne Whiston Spirn, a photographer and professor of landscape architecture at MIT, found the negatives of Lange’s photos at the Library of Congress and produced a book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field.
It focuses on the year Lange spent documenting the lives of farm workers in the Pacific Northwest.
In 1939, Lange was at her most productive and contentious, Spirn said.
As the 1930s wore on, “Things weren’t working as well as the bureaucrats would have liked,” Spirn told National Public Radio.
For its part, the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission in 2009 organized a traveling exhibition of Lange photographs from Oregon.
More than 50,000 people have viewed the exhibition that appeared at Portland State, University of Oregon, Bay City, Washington County Historical Museum and the Four Rivers Cultural Center in Ontario.
Exhibition photographs can be viewed by visiting the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission’s web site at: http://ochcom.org/lange/
