Cantaloupe Pickers, Mexicans, at End of Day in California Melon Fields / Mexican Labor Off for the Melon Fields in the Imperial Valley, California

July 1935

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Dimensions

18.9 × 23.7 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-864251

> Dorothea Lange met economics professor Paul Schuster Taylor in 1934 when her photographs of labor leaders, May Day demonstrators, and breadline recipients ([2000.43.1](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/129301)) were on view in her first one person show at her friend Willard Van Dyke's studio. Taylor would become Lange's professional partner and in 1935, her second husband. For Taylor, pictures were as important as statistics and analysis; his research methodology included photography from 1927 on. However, before he met Lange, the pictures that he used were his own. Taylor's young family was his first subject in the 1920s, but, apparently inspired by the combination of text and images in the social welfare journal that had published much of Lewis Hine's innovative documentary work—*Survey Graphic*—he chose to take his Kodak with him when he began the study of Mexican migrants. Van Dyke also exhibited the economist's prints at about the same time. Once a team in the field, Lange made the photographs with her more professional equipment (various Graflex, Rolleiflex, and view cameras) while Taylor continued his interviews with farm workers. > > Taylor was raised in w…