The February 29th New York Times has a piece by Tess Taylor, talking about her pilgrimage to California, to visit as many places photographed by Dorothea Lange as she can. She also read Lange’s pocket notebooks, now archived at the Oakland Museum of California.

Ms. Lange, best known for her Depression-era photographs of migrant laborers, began photographing bread lines and labor strikes near her San Francisco studio in 1932. In the 1920s, she had made her living as a society portraitist, photographing San Francisco’s wealthiest families — the Levi Strauss and the Haasfamilies among them.

As the Great Depression worsened, she began photographing people she saw on the streets: men curled up sleeping or in line for food. In 1935, she married the economist Paul Taylor; they left San Francisco together to photograph the living conditions of agricultural laborers up and down the state, from Davis and Marysville all the way to Imperial County. The Farm Security Administration supported their work.

In 2017, I started reading Ms. Lange’s notebooks, now held at the Oakland Museum of California. On lined 3 by 5 inch pages, in penciled-in cursive, she captures American history in staccato fragments, jotting down what laborers paid for gas, rent and food; how much they could make picking a day’s worth of potatoes. On one June trip following the melon harvest in El Centro, under a heading “The camp,” she notes someone saying: “This is a hard life to swallow, but I can’t just rest here.”

The image below is the only page of notes pictured in the article, but it’s written on government stationery, not in a notebook. I haven’t been able to find any other images of the notebooks online, unfortunately!

Read more at New York Times: Following Dorothea Lange’s Notebooks