This is a Norman Rockwell-style interpretation of a nearly 90-year-old black-and-white photograph.
Sometimes a photograph just grabs me.
That one did.
Dorothea Lange took the original black-and-white photograph in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley in November 1936. The Library of Congress caption doesn’t give us much:
“Cotton picker. Southern San Joaquin Valley, California.”
No name. No age. No story about who she was or what became of her.
But we have her face.
She was standing in a cotton field with a picking sack wrapped around her waist. Part of an old automobile is visible beside her. Cotton stretches across the field behind her.
And she was smiling.
That is probably what caught my attention.
We are accustomed to Dorothea Lange’s photographs from the Great Depression showing hardship. Her most famous photograph, “Migrant Mother,” has practically become a symbol of the Depression.
This woman gives us something different.
That doesn’t mean her life was easy. Lange’s photographs from the same San Joaquin Valley cotton harvest show that pickers were paid about $1.00 to $1.25 for every hundred pounds of cotton they picked.
Think about that sack around her waist for a minute.
One hundred pounds of cotton for a dollar.
Lange was also photographing Mexican and Mexican-American workers in these same California cotton fields. I initially thought this woman was identified as Mexican, too. After digging through the Library of Congress records, however, I couldn’t document that. The original caption for this particular negative identifies her only as a “cotton picker.”
So that’s where I’ll leave it.
The image above isn’t the original photograph. I restored the nearly 90-year-old photograph first, then used it as the basis for this Norman Rockwell-style interpretation. I wanted to keep the woman, her smile, the cotton sack, the automobile, and the field, while seeing what the scene might have looked like in color through an illustrator’s eyes.
I like the result.
But I keep coming back to what interested me in the original.
We know Dorothea Lange photographed her in November 1936. We know where she was. We know what she was doing. We even have a pretty good idea of what she was being paid.
What we don’t know is her name.
Nearly 90 years later, we can still see her smile.
Sometimes a photograph preserves the face better than history preserves the person.
Odds & Ends 045
The Past, Reimagined Like Rockwell #17
