There’s an image by Dorothea Lange I think of often. It’s a bright day in March 1935, and a young woman is perched far out on a plank above a makeshift pond of irrigation runoff, balancing as she dips her bucket in. Lange’s caption describes this scene: Drinking water for field worker’s family. Imperial Valley, California, near El Centro. The photo puts many elements in stark relief: the need for clean drinking water; the need to water crops; the need for decent work; and wider questions of which systems allow people to drink, eat, and live in dignity. The woman holds her fragile balance on the plank: Nothing about these questions is easy.  

Lange photographed water frequently—at scales that ranged from huge irrigation systems to clean cement washtubs at newly constructed labor camps to rusting buckets at the door of farm laborers’ encampments. A working mother who hung her drying prints in her garage next to her own laundry, Lange also loved photographing laundry on the line. Yet together, her drinking-water, irrigation-water, and laundry shots weave to depict bigger concerns: How do we create systems that let us live justly with one another and the earth? 

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Tess Taylor is a poet, playwright and cultural critic who Ilya Kaminsky recently hailed as “the poet for our moment.” She writes about place, ecology and cultural reckoning, and her poems have received wide national and international acclaim. She is the author of five celebrated poetry collections including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, and Rift Zone (named a 2020 Boston Globe best book), and Work & Days (a 2016 NY Times best poetry book). Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times, and more. She has taught widely, from UC Berkeley to Queen’s University in Belfast, and served as on air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She recently published her first full length poetry anthology, Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. A staged adaptation of her book of poems about Dorothea Lange will launch at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2025. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2027. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.