Abandoned tenant house seen across tractored fields. Hall County, Texas. Many tenants who have filled the land on the family-farm basis are made landless, forced by the machine into the towns, or reduced to day labor on the farms. Large numbers who have gone to the towns have fallen on relief, or even have sought refuge in distant parts. Not only is their security gone, but the opportunity even to rise to ownership is diminished, for profitable operation of mechanized farms requires more land and more capital equipment per farm

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Dorothea Lange contracted polio as a young girl. She learned professional photography skills while working in New York in her early 20s, and then landed in San Francisco where she ran a portrait business catering to the city's wealthy elite. Her second husband, Paul Taylor, helped her to get out into the fields with the destitute pickers, who she'd treat like portrait subjects with empathy and identification with her subjects. When the Depression hit, she captured crowded breadlines. In the late 1930s Dorothea Lange had been hired by the photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration - to photograph Dust Bowl refugees escaped into California from the Midwest and her images went far beyond bureaucratic reportage. A skilled portraitist, Lange might not have been able to change government policies, but her images for the FSA were picked up by newspapers across the country. John Steinbeck used them for inspiration in his 1939 Dust Bowl tale "The Grapes of Wrath."