Sunday Read: Dorothea Lange's historic online photographs features immigrant workers

Dorothy Lange chronicling the history of California through her lens.

So you're stuck at home going stir-crazy ... take a trip to the past and see waves of migrants who made California and led the way to the state as it is today: home of the most immigrants, home to the largest communities of Filipino Americans, Korean Americans, Chinese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian communities outside of Asia and the Pacific.

Dorothea Lange, one of the nation's premiere photographers, was there. She helped chronicle the history and people of America through her lens during the Great Recession and during WWII.

Lange's Photographs of “Okies” and “Arkies” — the dust-caked Depression-era refugees standing forlorn before their ragged tents or trudging along desolate highways — are familiar to many Americans. They inspired John Steinbeck to write novels about them and have lodged themselves deeply in the country’s psyche.

Less known, but just as powerful, are her photographs of Asian Californians.

Her photographs are now available online through the Oakland Museum of California's digital archive. A grant from the Henry Luce Foundation enabled the museum to make the work more widely accessible.

Included in the hundreds of photographs are pictures of AAPI who were present before the 1965 Immigration Reform Act which opened the doors to people not from Europe. They suffered through the Depression like everyone else and unlike everyone else, they were singled out for imprisonment during WWII.

Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.
San Francisco students recite the Pledge of Allegiance, days before being incarcarated during WWII

Supported by government programs and new picture magazines like LIFE, Lange and other photographers of the 1930s and '40s created an indelible record of everyday life in difficult times. The Great Depression caused many photographers to consider the camera as an instrument of social change. Foremost among this group was Berkeley photographer Lange, whose intimate pictures of people in distress were driven by a deep personal empathy.

Lange was driven by the belief that seeing the effects of injustice could provoke reform and, just perhaps, change the world. From documenting the plight of Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression to illuminating the grim conditions of incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II, Lange’s photographs demonstrate how empathy and compassion—focused through art—can sway minds and prompt change throughout this nation’s history. 

California’s waves of immigrant workers have always been essential, said Kent Wong, director of the University of California, Los Angeles Labor Center, but rarely have they been hailed as such.

“Immigrant laborers have been a mainstay of the California economy and in the growth of agriculture over the generations,” he told the New York Times. “And yet they have always faced extreme poverty, terrible working conditions, and their lives have always been seen as disposable.”

“When we reflect on what Dorothea Lange was documenting in the 1930s, in many ways, very little has changed,” Wong told the New York Times.

One heartrending photograph shows young girls of Japanese ancestry pledging allegiance at a San Francisco elementary school just before the U.S. government forced thousands of Japanese Americans into remote camps where they were incarcerated for years.

Another image shows a man’s bare back as he plows cauliflower fields in Guadalupe, Calif., in 1937. It’s labeled “Filipino Field Worker.”

Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.
A Filipino farmworker planting cauliflower in California.

She continued her intensely personal work after the Depression, creating series on the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, Irish country life, and postwar suburban California, among many other projects.

The Oakland Museum of California houses Lange’s personal archive, a gift from the artist that includes 25,000 negatives, 6,000 vintage prints, field notes, and personal memorabilia. Curators and researchers from around the world visit the Museum to access the Lange collection.

Lange’s work continues to resonate with millions and inspire new generations of artist-activists, illustrating the power of photography as a form of social activism.

Throughout the pandemic, California’s communities of color have been disproportionately asked to shoulder the risks of “essential” work — including Filipino health care workers comforting Covid-stricken patients in hospitals and caring for residents of nursing homes, and the Latino workers shipping off crates of produce in the Inland Empire.

Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.
Filiipino farmworkers harvest lettuce in California field.

It’s worth remembering that California has also been the birthplace of movements for worker protections that we may take for granted such as the 1965 Grape Strike led by Filipino farm workers that eventually became the influential United Farm Workers. More change is possible and necessary.

If Lange was photographing the events of today, she would be in the hospital ICU's chronicling the plight of Filipino nurses, the Latino farm workers bent over to pick  produce and in the Amazon centers boxing and transporting tons of packages to the doors of social-distancing Americans.

“The 1930s was a decade of huge change and transformation, including in labor law,” Wong said. “I see significant parallels between that era and today.”

EXPLORE the Dorothea Lange Digital Archive.