Explore Stoop Labor in Cotton Field, San Joaquin Valley, California

K–12 Resource: Close Looking

Read about Dorothea Lange’s photograph of a poorly paid migrant laborer in 1930s California

Title

Stoop Labor in Cotton Field, San Joaquin Valley, California

Artist/Maker

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895 - 1965)

Date

1938

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Dimensions

Image: 23.5 × 30 cm (9 1/4 × 11 13/16 in.)

Object Type

Print Photograph

Credit Line

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2000.50.11

Assignment

Read About This Photograph by Dorothea Lange

In this photograph, a man is shown stooped over in a field of cotton. The horizon line is high, making the worker appear large, even monumental, as he goes about his work in the bright sunlight. The bag he drags looks very heavy. Yet Dorothea Lange’s photograph makes the difficult and exhausting work look graceful. The coarse cloth of his overalls and heavy bag seems to drape in beautiful ways.

In the revised edition of An American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor (1969), this photograph is accompanied by a caption from Paul Taylor’s field notes: “Migratory cotton pickers paid 75 cents per 100 pounds. A good day’s pick is 200 pounds. CIO union strikers demand $1 per 100 pounds.” Workers who were paid by the day lacked job security and were forced to move their families again and again in search of work.

The work of picking cotton is portrayed in John Steinbeck’s 1939 book about migrant life in California, The Grapes of Wrath. Like other seasonal labor, it was part of life for the Joad family, who had fled the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma. Steinbeck describes the process from the migrant’s viewpoint:

Now the bag is heavy, boost it along. Set your hips and tow it along, like a workhorse. And the kids pickin’ into the old man’s sack. Good crop here. Gets thin in the low places, thin and stringy. Never seen no cotton like this here California cotton.

Questions

Write or discuss your responses.

  • How has Lange framed her subject?
  • How do you think the man is feeling? What do you see in the picture that gives you clues about this?
  • How would you describe the mood of this picture? Would this picture have a different mood if the top half were filled by the sky?
  • Why do you think Lange chose not to clearly show the man’s face?
  • What do you think this man will do after the cotton-picking season has ended?

Glossary

CIO

Congress of Industrial Organizations—a large labor union organization formed in the 1930s in the United States.

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Related Standards

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