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The simple, straightforward story presented here by Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones is an understatement — purposely and understatement. Under the swelling pressure of a skyrocketing birth rate, places for people to live and water for crops and factories has become critical. Perhaps understatement is the better way to show that bulldozers are only slightly slower than atomic bombs; or that the nature of destruction is not altered by calling it the price of progress.

To witness population inflation of such proportions that ways of life are uprooted, fruiting trees sawed down, productive land inundated and bodies already buried force out of the ground is to realize that as life teems so does death. And that man is the active agent of both.

Aperture magazine, 1960