Farm Security Administration Office, Visalia, California, 1938 © Horace Bristol / Courtesy of Corbis Corporation

Born and raised in California, Horace Bristol (American, 1908–1997) began his career as a freelance photographer in San Francisco in the late 1920s. By the 1940s, he was a leading documentary photographer for magazines such as Life, Fortune, and Time. Influenced by the work of Dorothea Lange, Bristol proposed a picture story for Life in 1937 on dust bowl migrants and asked writer John Steinbeck to collaborate with him. This exhibition, which complements the Dorothea Lange exhibition, presents the pictures Bristol created while he and Steinbeck traveled together to California labor camps in the winter of 1937–38. The artists later translated the same subject into their respective mediums. Although Bristol's planned photographic book was never realized, these images were used as reference material while casting and costuming the 1940 film version of The Grapes of Wrath.

	Migrant Camp, near Visalia, Tulare County, California, 1938 © Horace Bristol / Courtesy of Corbis Corporation

After retiring to Ojai, California, in 1976, Bristol reconsidered his early career. He renamed his 1937–38 photographs of migrant camps and titled the series The Grapes of Wrath to identify it with Steinbeck's 1939 novel of the same title. Bristol retitled this image Tom Joad Chopping Wood, in reference to Steinbeck's main character. This rugged yet sympathetic young man is reminiscent of the character portrayed by Henry Fonda in the film version of the novel.

Living in Government Supplied Tents, 1938 © Horace Bristol / Courtesy of Corbis Corporation

After Steinbeck's novel and its film version had gained popularity, Bristol's images, including this photograph, were published in two articles in Life magazine. In 1940, one of these articles paired movie stills from The Grapes of Wrath with Bristol's photographs to assert the film's authenticity. With its muddy foreground, grimy tents, and cloudy sky, this photograph conveys the desolate surroundings of a camp in Visalia during the winter of 1937–38.

	Nursing Mother in Camp, near Visalia, Tulare County, California, 1938 © Horace Bristol / Courtesy of Corbis Corporation

In describing this image, Bristol said, "When this photograph was taken, both Steinbeck and I felt it represented a Madonna figure, with the newborn baby at its mother's swelling breasts, a faint suggestion of proud fatherhood in the background legs and hand." He later titled this picture Rose of Sharon after Steinbeck's fictitious character.