Dorothea Lange photographed children working on farms, both on their parents’ farms and as migrant agricultural workers. “All the children work,” she wrote of one family on a stumpfarm in western Washington, and she recorded what two of the children bought with the money they earned. Lange also documented the conditions faced by migrant children in the hopfields and submitted an article on child labor along with her photographs and report.

In 2006, I visited a library in the Yakima Valley of Washington and showed the librarian Lange’s photographs of the region. The library , a trailer with bars on the windows, which is open three afternoons a week, is next to housing for migrant farm workers. Children, mostly Hispanic, came and went: borrowing books, working on computers. I remarked on Lange’s many photographs of children working in the fields. “Children still do,” the librarian replied.

For more information on child labor today, see Stop Child Labor. http://www.stopchildlabor.org/USchildlabor