Getty Museum

[The Road West / Highway to the West, U.S. 54 in Southern New Mexico]

Dorothea Lange

Date

negative 1938; print 1965

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> The real migrants pictured in Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor's documentary photo essay *An American Exodus* (1939) and the fictional ones portrayed in John Steinbeck's *The Grapes of Wrath* (1939) were all part of the road culture that developed in 1930s America. The era's most talented balladeer, the Oklahoman Woody Guthrie, wrote song after song about this "hard traveling," including "Going Down the Road," "I Ain't Got No Home," "Lonesome Soul Blues," and his ode to Route 66, "Will Rogers Highway." John Ford's 1940 film version of *The Grapes of Wrath* opened with a view of an empty highway, setting the scene for an epic story that takes place almost entirely on the road or just off of it in a temporary migrant camp. Steinbeck devotes chapter 12 of his novel to what he called "the main migrant road" and manages to contain its immense significance in one sentence: "66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that hole up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there." > > Lange's *Highway to the West* was the closing image for the third section in *An American Exodus—*Midcontinent—which is specifically about rural conditions in Oklahoma and includes six pictures of families on the road. When the book was revised in 1969 under Taylor's direction, this simple composition of lines indicating pavement, prairie, and sky served as the signature image, appearing at the beginning and end of the volume. Lange's skill in treating the subject of a vast Western landscape may have come in part from exposure to canvases of the early 1930s by her first husband, Maynard Dixon. Such paintings as *The Plains* (1931) and *Approach to Zion* (1933) show his ability to express an enormous horizontal expanse of land and sky while subtly connecting foreground and background with the lines of a road. However, Lange's subject in 1938 was the road itself, and it, appropriately, dominates her vision of the landscape. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 42. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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