Getty Museum

Amana Society Village, Iowa

Date

negative 1941; print about 1960s

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> After years of completing assignments issued from Washington, D. C., Dorothea Lange was anxious to have time to herself, working in the field and in the darkroom at her own pace. To this end she applied for a yearlong Guggenheim Fellowship in 1940 with this simple statement of purpose: "To photograph people in selected rural American communities. The theme of the project is the relation of man to earth and man to man, and the forces of stability and change in communities of contrasting types." She and her second husband, Paul Schuster Taylor, whose academic pursuit continued to be the study of agricultural labor, planned a trip to Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska. They hoped to visit various cooperative communities settled by nineteenth-century immigrants, such as the Amana Society villages in eastern Iowa. > > Taylor, who grew up on the other side of the state, in Sioux City, may have suggested Iowa as a destination. He described the history of this group in a 1942 article for the Department of Agriculture: "About 1855, a German Protestant sect, the Community of True Inspiration, bought 26,000 acres of good land in eastern Iowa. The grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even a few of the children are there today. Their forefathers pooled their goods when they went to the frontier before the Civil War and founded the seven villages of Amana. Their religion didn't command that, like early Christians, they should have all things in common, but it permitted it." Taylor goes on to say that in 1932 the community "voted out communism in the form they had known it." The enormous farm was, however, still run as one unit by society members, such as this couple, who are shelling peas together in what appears to be a photographic variation on Wood's signature printing, [*American Gothic*](http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565) (1930). Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 48. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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