There's a particular satisfaction in seeing a photographer's contact sheets, the frames they hesitated over, the shots they almost used, the alternatives that never made the cut. Most of us, sadly, will never get that access. For the complete archive of one of Dorothea Lange's most ambitious projects, though, that access has just become free to anyone with an internet connection.
UC Santa Cruz Library has digitised and published 3,200 photographs taken by Lange and Pirkle Jones for their project Death of a Valley, a documentary record of the final year of Monticello, a small agricultural community in California's Berryessa Valley.
