Mysterious images from the Depression

Life isn't supposed to be this hard, not in California. Yet here she sits on a saggy mattress in a raggedy tent at a migratory labor camp in Sacramento, this lovely young woman, her head resting on her hand, her expression so very sad. It's mid-morning, but already the day seems lost to her.

This is how Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange found her in November 1936.

But who is she and what became of her? An East Coast historian hopes someone knows her story.

"I thought this was one of the most beautiful photographs I had ever seen," says Joe Manning, who lives in Florence, Mass. "I thought there was a chance she hung around Sacramento and somebody would know who she was. She may have children who would recognize their mother."

Manning first saw the photograph on a Web site that posts historic images. Then he went to the source, the Library of Congress' online site, where he found that it was among 170,000 black-and-white images in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection. The photographs were taken in the 1930s and '40s, and many of the subjects weren't identified.

Manning had tracked down the names of more than 100 anonymous children in early-1900s National Child Labor Committee photos and was ready for more detective work.

"The Farm Security Administration photographs had a purpose back then, but now I look at them as a scrapbook of unfinished stories," he says. "You don't know what happened the next day, the next year. You don't know anything about their lives from that day forward."

He chose 10 FSA images and contacted newspapers in the cities where they had been taken, asking editors to publish their "hometown" photograph and a story about his quest. Since newspaper people are inherently interested in local history, most – including The Bee – complied.

Thanks to helpful readers, Manning has learned the identities of a Nebraska girl (now 79 years old, she was on her way to school when her picture was taken), families in Vermont and North Carolina, and a father and daughter in Illinois.

Now he hopes someone can tell him about the young woman in Sacramento whose picture, more than 70 years old, so mesmerized him.

"Dorothea Lange has been criticized as much as she has been praised for this amazing ability to create drama in her pictures, drama for which we can be empathetic," Manning says. "The combination of (the subject's) face showing what I think of as great beauty and what looks like great pain, possibly boredom, it seemed to be a miraculous photograph."

Lange was a commercial portrait photographer in San Francisco in the early 1920s and began experimenting with documentary photography while touring the Southwest with her first husband, artist Maynard Dixon. During the Depression she photographed impoverished San Franciscans standing in line for bread and jobs. During World War II, she recorded the evacuation of Japanese Americans to government-run camps.

In the 1930s, Roy Stryker headed up a project for the Farm Security Administration (later renamed the Office of War Information), to document the plight of Dust Bowl refugees. A prolonged drought in Oklahoma, Kansas and other prairie states had killed crops, stirred up horrible dust storms and put many destitute families on the road to California, where they hoped to find a better life.

Stryker hired some top-notch photographers, including Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee and Carl Mydans, and dispatched them to make "a visual encyclopedia of American life."

They, particularly Lange, produced some of the most famous documentary images in history.

"What Lange is cited for most is her empathy for her subjects," says Diana Daniels, assistant curator at Sacramento's Crocker Art Museum. "In some ways she exceeded straight documentation, because she took the time to make her subjects comfortable with her, to make them forget they were on camera. (The photographs) work because her subjects aren't staring you in the eye.

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