In 1936, working under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, Dorothea Lange traveled through the American South, documenting the Depression’s effects on farmer and their workers. While her brief was to photograph the cultural impact of harsh economic conditions and government assistance, in the South she was shocked to find that the status quo still reigned. Lange’s son, Daniel Dixon wrote of her trip to the South that ‘she ran up against a problem she had never encountered before. Up until then, most of her work had been done in areas where the Depression had shaken apart any social order. But in the South, a social order remained, and it held so tenaciously to those who lived under it that in order to photograph the people, she discovered that she had to photograph the order as well.’
This image is an emblematic document of the status of most Black agricultural workers in the South at the time, many of them unlanded tenant farmers, or – as in the photograph offered here – employed on large plantations that still clung to the hierarchies of the old South.
The figure on the far left of the frame in this photograph is Lange’s husband, economist and writer Paul Schuster Taylor. Lange and Taylor operated as a team in the field, with Taylor interviewing subjects and gathering data, and Lange making the photographic documentation. In this image, the plantation owner is clearly in conversation with Taylor, allowing Lange to photograph him candidly while also creating a compelling study of the workers on the steps behind him.
