In 1939, Dorothea Lange worked in California, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest on assignment for the Farm Security Administration. She submitted the texts and photographs below to the FSA office in Washington, DC. Those below include six of her seventy-five General Captions of 1939; all are presented in the book, DARING TO LOOK.

February 1939: Imperial Valley, California
Migrant family with eleven children

July 1939: Person County, North Carolina
Hillside farm
Annual Cleaning-Up Day
A Country Church on “Meeting Sunday”
1964: Dorothea Lange remembers North Carolina in July 1939

October 1939: Malheur County, Oregon
Malheur County
Dead Ox Flat, Malheur County, Southeast Oregon
The Soper Family

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, 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.

CLICK HERE for a list of Dorothea Lange’s General Captions of 1939.