The Gardener, Mr. Fujimoto and Gregor Dixon, Planting Vegetables, Berkeley, California

From the Getty Museum record

> The relationship of man to the land was a constant theme in Lange's photography, at least from the time of her 1930s fieldwork for the Farm Security Administration. She recorded this subject wherever she found it, whether in the San Joaquin Valley, where migrant workers were picking lettuce; in western Ireland, where farmers were digging potatoes; or in her own backyard in Berkeley, where her six-year-old grandson and her gardener were putting seeds into the ground. Labor, the act of working and the peculiar choreography it often involves, was also a continuing motif in her pictures. > > In this image Lange captured the forms of the boy and man at their task, bending from the waist to spade and cover. They work in unison, their positions and movements in sync. At the same time, however, there are differences. The boy is smaller, partially unclothed, and uses his hands in the dirt; the larger man wears a shirt, hat, and shoes and employs a steel tool. Lange's eye has collected in this portrayal not only youth and age but also nature and civilization. The subject of family, of a father passing a craft on to his son, may also have occurred to her. If so, she has drafted Mr. Fujimoto, whom she paid to care for her yard, to stand in for Gregor's busy young father and equally preoccupied grandfather. The scene may contain a less romantic message as well. Mr. Fujimoto could be considered a representative of the postwar Japanese American community in the San Francisco area. Having lost their jobs and property due to internment, many of the men turned to landscape gardening for desperately needed employment. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 78. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.