Heading:
Author: Lange, Dorothea
Title: [Portrait of Joseph V. Skinner, Owens Valley, CA]
Place Published: San Francisco
Publisher:
Date Published: 1925
Description:

Gelatin silver print on matte sheet tipped into mat. 22.6x18.9 cm (9x7½");  mat: 41x31 cm (16x12").

Signed and dated by Dorothea Lange at lower right. A scarce Dorothea Lange photograph from the 1920's taken five years after her wedding to western artist Maynard Dixon. At this time, prior to the establishment of Group f/64, Lange was working as a portrait photographer, but she is clearly on her way to the style that would define her career with the dustbowl images of the 1930's and other images of "social erosion" in the American West. Pictured here is Joseph V. Skinner, a pioneer who had fought in the Indian Wars (notably at Sand Creek) on his way to establishing himself as a farmer in Owens Valley in 1892. Skinner would sell that property to the City of Los Angeles making way for the Los Angeles aqueduct that would supply a steady stream of potable water to the burgeoning and voracious metropolis. The politics of water in arid California and the social cost of over-development would become major themes in Lange's later work, not only for the Farm Security Administration but also in the collaboration with Pirkle Jones, Death of a Valley. The 1960 photo essay documented the sacrifice of Monticello, CA which was inundated to create a dam for development of the surrounding lands. The present photograph reflects her time with Maynard Dixon exploring the western legacy of California and looks forward to her later work, it articulates themes which would span her remarkable career. OMCA's Dorothea Lange archive holds the negative for this image, but no print.

From Death of a Valley: 

"The development, distribution and control of water has become California's biggest problem. The New California is coming in with a roar and the new people are bringing with them the greatest population increase ever witnessed in the history of the United States. Everywhere farms and ranches are being torn up and made over into tract sites; orchards are being converted into industrial sites...Demands for more water caused the death of the Berryessa Valley. It disappeared 125 feet deep behind a dam in order to store water for irrigation in the bigger valleys below and to provide industrial water for the expanding cities." - Dorothea Lange.

Some slightly uneven sunning to image, small spot at lower right in image area; very good or better.