Stories

Each of Lange’s seventy-five General Captions of 1939 stands as a portrait of a moment, a place, a group of people, a theme. Together, as they appear in the book, DARING TO LOOK, [make link to “Book”] they paint a portrait of rural land and society in America and of the forces transforming them at the height of the Great Depression.

In California, Lange documents the spread of new highways and industrialized agriculture with its migrant workers. In North Carolina, she captures the daily lives of sharecroppers on the farm, in town, at church. In the Pacific Northwest, she covers the irrigation of sagebrush desert and the resettlement of Dust Bowl refugees and the vast acres of cutover forest and the pioneers who settled the stumplands.

The book, DARING TO LOOK, [make link] presents the full text of these reports from the field, along with selected photographs.

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General Caption List


The texts below are reproduced in DARING TO LOOK: Photographs and Reports from the Field by Dorothea Lange, by Anne Whiston Spirn (University of Chicago Press, 2008). To see a few examples, click on the highlighted titles.

California

US 99
FSA camp for migratory agricultural workers
Mineral King Cooperative Farm

North Carolina

Farm house and farm landscape of Negro tenant cotton farmer
Main street of Pittsboro on a Saturday afternoon
Putting in tobacco
Colored tenant
Small tobacco farm
The tobacco barn
Along a country road in Person County
Siler City, Chatham County
Negro topping tobacco
Building a tobacco barn
Negro small owner
White sharecropper
Negro tenant house and noon-time chores
Negro sharecropper and family
>>Hillside farm
Tobacco barns and farm boy
Log house and white rural non-farm family
White share-cropper family
>>Annual cleaning-up day at Wheeley’s Church
>> Wheeley’s Church on Meeting Sunday

Pacific Northwest

Panaceas
Shacktowns
Migratory families in the Yakima Valley
Rural rehabilitation
Another migrant family
Family traveling by freight train
The stockade in the center of town
Shacktown, Yakima, Washington
Yakima Valley
Pear Harvesting
Columbia Basin, near Quincy, Washington
Thurston County, western Washington
Western Washington small town
Another western Washington town
Abandoned mill town
The bulldozer
Longview homesteads
Migratory single workers (“Solos”)
Frontier town
Hop harvest in Oregon
String bean harvest
Process of resettlement in the West
Ola Self-Help Sawmill Cooperative
Recent settlement of cutover lands in Northern Idaho
The Cox family
The Halley family
The Unruh family
Water supply on cutover farms
The Evanson family
The Denchow family
The Nieman family
Yamhill Farms
West Carlton chopper cooperative
Irrigon, Oregon
Yamhill Farm Family Labor Camp
Small lumber mill
Merrill Farm Family Labor Camp
Tulelake, during the potato harvest
Living conditions for potato pickers at Malin
Family from Deadwood, South Dakota
Malheur County, Southeast Oregon
Dead Ox Flat, Malheur County, Southeastern Oregon
Migrant family
Lincoln Bench School
A trading center for the newly opened country
John Bartheloma
The Soper Family
The Roberts family
The Daugherty, family
The Dazey family
New style company lumber town