Lot 68: PIRKLE JONES B. 1914

PROPERTY OF VARIOUS OWNERS

'GRAPE PICKER, BERRYESSA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA'

measurements note
22 7/8 by 20 in. (58.1 by 50.8 cm.)

large-format, signed and dated by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, matted, framed, 1956 (Pirkle Jones, cover and p. 33)

NOTE

In 1956, Pirkle Jones collaborated with Dorothea Lange on a project for Life magazine, documenting the destruction and flooding of the small farming town of Monticello, California, in the Berryessa Valley. The series, entitled Death of a Valley, captured the lives of the some 250 residents in the year prior to the construction of the Monticello Dam.

The experience had a dramatic effect on Jones, and he considered it to be one of the most meaningful projects of his career. 'My response to the people and the events that unfolded as I photographed in the valley were influenced both by my background of living on a farm when I was a youngster and the sense of urgency that Dorothea and I felt as we worked to record the events of this last year in the valley. The people in the valley were being dislocated, their homes destroyed or moved, and the way of life as they had experienced it for a generation was coming to an end. We knew that we were seeing and recording for the last time--the orchards in bloom, the beautiful home with its mature, leafy walnut trees, the McKenzie Store, the harvesting of the pears, grapes and grain...' (Pirkle Jones, p. 37).

Although never published in Life, the series was featured in a forty-page photo essay in Aperture magazine in 1960. In that same year, the project became an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The photograph offered here is one of only three early prints of this image extant in this size format.