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? 

At the moment Lange made her “Drinking Water” photograph, Imperial County, which receives less than three inches of rainfall per year, was also becoming the site of the All-American Canal, a vast dam and tunnel scheme that diverts Colorado River water from near Yuma, Arizona, and channels it along the U.S. border, so it can irrigate crops in a desert 80 miles away. Lange photographed the canal’s construction, documenting the way it changed labor and agriculture. Ninety years later, the canal still flows, though huge border walls run along it, and the distant river, groundwater, and mountain glaciers that feed it are all imperiled.

Imperial County is still a center for water-intensive crops like alfalfa, carrots, and lettuce. It’s also a center for border security. While most people don’t pull daily drinking water from irrigation ditches, the county (where the unemployment rate peaked at over 20 percent in July) is still a place where people live in great precarity, using imported water to farm a desert that often reverts to toxic alkaline dust. 

“Everything is difficult to photograph well,” Lange commented in an oral interview at the end of her life. “But what surprises me is that when [photographers] present this story of agricultural labor, people don’t really see the big story behind it, which is the story of our natural resources. . . .  That’s where the  documentary job has got to be done, to show, for instance, what we in California have done in passing the water bill.” It is hard to photograph a bill, or to figure out which telling details let us glimpse the larger stories in which our lives are enmeshed. Yet Lange was an amazing notetaker and visual storyteller. Across decades, she found ways to interleave the environmental and social concerns of a rapidly changing California. 

Later, Lange would photograph development from different angles—documenting Bay Area fields ripped up for tract housing, the communities of the Berryessa Valley being displaced to create the reservoir that is now Lake Berryessa. It sits above a dam on Putah Creek, over the ghosts of destroyed farming communities, regularizing water for the large-scale crops that make Northern California famous: grapes, tomatoes, almonds. In these backstories of the California we inherit today, Lange still asks us to bear witness to the fragile accord we strike with one another, and with the earth itself.  

Lange’s colleague Ansel Adams spent the 1930s and ‘40s mythologizing a California of rare, seemingly unspoiled places (think of the unpeopled shot of a Jeffrey pine). In the same decades, Lange made a different sort of environmental photography: one that examines the costs and compromises that build and sustain our lives. To me, Lange remains the richer environmental prophet: Enmeshed in what my friend Maggie likes to call “unsexy infrastructure,” she photographs the challenges facing people who labor, the immense project of producing food, the difficulty of finding balance between our hunger for things and their cost.  So much of her work—about shelterlessness, migrancy, climate catastrophe, even internment—provides a prescient map of the issues we live with now. Lange shows us a California that’s not pristine, but problematic—and like the woman bending over the irrigation ditch, thirsty—in this case for our attention, our fascination, our care.

Tess Taylor’s play Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange will premiere at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art this November and December.

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.