For the first half of 1939, Lange worked in California’s agricultural valleys. She followed the harvests with the migrant workers – from the Imperial Valley in February to the San Joaquin in May – and photographed them in the fields and in their camps.

“This photograph tells the whole story,” says Rondal Partridge, who worked as Dorothea Lange’s assistant. “With the Rolleiflex around her neck, she would set up another camera on a tripod. The camera on the tripod was a ‘come-on.’ The kids would gather round and ask for their picture to be taken. Then they would run to tell their parents, and she would follow. That’s how she met the adults.” The series of Lange’s photographs of a migrant family with eleven children records this process.

To tell the stories of this and other families, Lange wrote long captions for individual photographs. Later that year, by May 1939, she would begin to compose General Captions for groups of individual photographs/captions.