Dorothea Lange Photos of Malheur County, OR, 1939
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- Category: News
- Published: Tuesday, 07 August 2018 04:19
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In 1939, Dorothea Lange did several photos of Malheur County, Oregon, including one of the "world's longest siphon," which brought water to arid parts of the county, and a particularly lovely one of kids ready to ride the school bus from the county's Dead Ox Flats. Lange's colleague, Russell Lee, did hundreds of photos of Vale, Oregon's July 4 festivities a couple of years later. (The Atlantic featured a set of those last year.) Lee is most remembered for his photographs of the Japanese being pushed into internment camps in 1942, and of racial segregation.
Why does this matter to Golden Antelope Press? Because Nancy Minor's forthcoming Malheur August is set along the Malheur River in Malheur County, and in neighboring Vale. It's a novel in which people matter most, but one in which people are shaped by their time and place, as much as by one another. Time, place, and people are rooted in the 1930s and 1940s. Though the novel's ostensible setting is 1971, its drama and its trauma come from the period when Lange and Russell were exploring America. Here's a link to one of Lange's pictures:
http://photogrammar.yale.edu/records/index.php?record=fsa2000004792/PP
and here's another:
http://photogrammar.yale.edu/records/index.php?record=fsa2000004745/PP
and here's the Atlantic's July 4, 2017 reminder of what life was like for our protagonist's fictional parents, Clete and Oleta Algood, as newlyweds with secrets, on July 4, 1941. The photos were by Russell Lee: