Detail of Barn, Irrigon, Morrow County, Oregon

By the time Lange set out to Oregon in 1939, her style was shifting, nowhere will you find the unobtrusive camera sometimes associated with documentary photography. In Detail of Barn, Irrigon, Morrow County, Oregon, there's a threatening, Malevich-style black square emerging below the barn's widow's peak, leading your eyes down into the depths of the nearly empty hay loft. You might not have seen the emptiness at first, but that angle leads you to see the farm's meager output. Lange wanted you to see what would otherwise go unnoticed, speaking about magnificence and wretchedness in the same image. She was gutsy, always daring to break rules, and let the details tell the story.