Dorothea Lange
Tenant farmer, Chatham County, North Carolina

ArtistAmerican, 1895–1965
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • Tenant farmer, Chatham County, North Carolina
Date1939, printed 1970s
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 7 3/8 × 6 15/16 in. (18.7 × 17.6 cm)
Sheet: 7 15/16 × 9 15/16 in. (20.2 × 25.2 cm)
Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Carl Niendorff
Object number2020.44
Not on view

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Department
Photography
Object Type
DescriptionFrom 1935 to 1939, working for the U.S. government’s Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration, Dorothea Lange recorded the desperate lives of migrant farm laborers. The assignment called for her to photograph the hard-hit agricultural areas of the American heartland—the South and the Midwest. Lange said that she was photographing both land and human erosion. Her deeply sincere and highly personalized images earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941, the first to be awarded to a female photographer.
Provenance[Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Monthly Photographs Online Auction, 191951, Lot 97048, December, 2019]; purchased by MFAH, 2020.

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