Making the
Film
Quotes from the Film
Awards and Screenings
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To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. But when the great photographs are produced, it will be down that road. But I have only touched it, just touched it. |
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Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940 FSA Collection, Library of Congress |
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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph
are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did
you find it, but they would say that such things could be. |
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Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA,
1936
FSA Collection, Library of Congress |
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That's the first day I ever made a photograph actually on the street. I put it on the wall of my studio and customers, people whom I was making portraits of would come in and glance at them. And the only comment I ever got was, "What are you going to do with this kind of thing? I didn't know. But I knew that picture was on my wall, and I knew that it was worth doing." |
| White
Angel Breadline, San
Francisco, Ca.
© Oakland Museum Collection |
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| Tom Collins was unknown, but he got the job of managing one of these government established camps for migratory workers. And John Steinbeck somehow or other encountered him, and Tom Collins is a big figure in the book! Tom is that camp manager in The Grapes of Wrath! | 
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| Tom Collins with Migrant Family
FSA Collection, Library of Congress |
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The consequences of the dustbowl, every Californian knows today what that did and brought. It changed the character of our state. We got not only a new population, we got a new point of view. |
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Wapato, Yakima
Valley, Wa. 1939 FSA Collection, Library of Congress |
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The billboards that were up at the time I photographed. Savage, savage billboards. This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we? |
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Richmond,
California, 1942
FSA Collection, Library of Congress |
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The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else's requirement but my own. |
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Pathan Warrior Tribesman, Khyber Pass, 1958
© Oakland Museum Collection |
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| The things of course that are very near to you are very difficult. What I am talking about, in the attempt to photograph your family, to really do it, is a very unfamiliar road. There is no road, there is no road. | 
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Maynard Dixon © Oakland Museum Collection |
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Dorothea at Home, 1960s © Rondal Partridge. All Rights Reserved. |