Filipinos Cutting Lettuce, Salinas, California (Filipinos working lettuce fields, Salinas, CA 1935)

Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1980. Photograph. Fine. A copy print, made from a photograph of the original print (see below).

In this Lange image, six people wearing long shirts and hats are bent over at the waist tending to rows of lettuce. A dried and cracked furrow fills the left foreground. Lange took this image while working for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration (two WPA agencies). The most famous image from this period in her career is Migrant Mother, the iconic Depression-era photograph.

Lange's images from this era often have descriptive names rather than titles, and they have changed over time. This one is called Filipinos Cutting Lettuce on the Library of Congress website; Filipinos Working Lettuce Fields is written in pencil on the back (verso) of this photograph.

At the time she took this photograph, Lange was working for the federal government and so the negatives belonged to her employer. For decades they have been on deposit at the Library of Congress and for many years, anyone could ask the library to make prints from the negatives. In this case, the negative (as indicated on the back of the photograph, is Z62-19804, which is identified by the library as a copy negative made from the original print as the original negative is missing.

Image, 7-5/16 by 8-1/4 on 8-by-10 inch sheet. A fine print, stamped on the back with a two-line blue legend in all caps, "Reproduced from the collections | of the Library of Congress" with notes about the negative used in pencil.

Prints from the Library of Congress are hard to date, but I suspect these are from the late 1970s or early 1980s.