Getty Museum

Young Mother and Son, Gunlock, Washington County, Utah

Date

1953

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> Dorothea Lange suffered health problems in the late 1940s, but she wanted to travel again and be part of the current documentary effort. Since the federal government was no longer funding such projects, this meant working for the thriving picture magazines. Lange proposed to *Life* that she and Ansel Adams do a project in Utah. They would travel with her son Daniel, who would write text for the article, and her husband, who had a continuing interest in the survival of utopian communities. Their purpose was to record the landscape ([2000.52.2](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/128375), [2000.43.9](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/129307), [2000.50.28](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/128370)), built environment, and inhabitants of three towns in southwestern Utah settled in the mid-nineteenth century by Mormons. The grandchildren of some of these pioneers were Lange's subjects during her visit to Gunlock, Toquerville, and St. George in 1953. > > In Gunlock, an isolated town of twenty-two families, Lange photographed this mother and child. She posed the young woman, who appears to be pregnant, with and without her son and at work in her kitchen bottling fruit. Although none of the images of this Utah mother appeared in *Life,* Lange did include her in *The American Country Woman*, a portfolio she prepared in the 1960s, and in a book on the theme, published posthumously. As Lange intended, quotes from some of the subjects accompanied their pictures. The security of this woman's environment is reflected in her statement: "If you run out of money here in Gunlock, you can go and pick yourself something in the garden." Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 64. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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