An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, created by photographer Dorothea Lange and writer Paul Schuster Taylor, assembles photographs made across the United States from 1935 to 1939 to examine rural displacement during the Depression. The project grew out of Lange’s broader investigation of migrant labor, rural poverty, tenancy, and agricultural change, developed through her work with the California State Emergency Relief Administration and later the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration, alongside periods of independent fieldwork. Published in 1939, the book was collaboratively conceived, with Lange serving as principal photographer and Taylor taking responsibility for the text.
Organized geographically from the South and Plains to California, the project traces how sharecropping, soil depletion, drought, foreclosure, and agricultural mechanization separated rural families from land and livelihood. Its central metaphor of "human erosion" links environmental damage to the dissolution of economic security, family stability, and community. California appears not as the fulfillment of westward migration but as another precarious landscape, shaped by industrialized agriculture and a demand for mobile seasonal labor.
Lange's monochrome photographs place people within fields, roads, cabins, camps, vehicles, and makeshift shelters, allowing surroundings to register as part of each subject's circumstances. Full-length portraits, close views, and low angles emphasize posture, hands, clothing, tools, and relationships among family members. The sequence creates recurring contrasts between tractors and cabins, abandoned houses and cultivated fields, roadside travelers and advertising billboards.
The authors described the camera as a research tool supported by a "tripod" of photographs, captions, and text. Taylor interviewed people and recorded their words while Lange photographed, and testimony was incorporated alongside historical analysis, institutional reports, and newspaper excerpts. Archival records for photographs associated with the project include both 4 × 5-inch and 2.25 × 2.25-inch negatives, indicating that Lange worked across more than one photographic format.
The book appeared late in 1939 and was soon remaindered as wartime concerns narrowed its readership. Its subsequent publication history includes a revised Yale University Press edition for the Oakland Museum in 1969, an Arno Press reprint in 1975, and a French facsimile in 1999. MoMA exhibited the book in 2015 and revisited it in Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures in 2020. Museo Reina Sofía included it in What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 in 2024, reflecting its later reassessment as a sustained collaboration between documentary photography, social research, and recorded speech.
