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Dimensions: 9 1/2 by 7 3/8 in. (24 by 19 cm.)

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Literature: Another print of this image:

Photographs of a Lifetime, Aperture, p. 19

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Notes: In the summer of 1935, Lange was hired by Roy Stryker as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration. Her first assignments were to document the living conditions of families who had fled the poverty of the Great Plains and settled in California. Early in 1936, before leaving on a trip which would take Lange into the Southwest, Stryker asked her to photograph the living conditions of indigent families in San Francisco. Feeling the need to extend the Administration's documentation to include urban and Western subjects, Stryker wrote that the Administration needed 'some good slum pictures... We need to vary the diet in some of our exhibits here by showing some western poverty instead of all south and east' (quoted in Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life, p. 130). The photograph offered here is one of the images Lange made on this assignment.