Gene Lore had no idea that the images of desperation tucked away in his Thousand Oaks attic could be so enriching.
There were photographs of pea pickers and cotton pickers, caved-in men with hung-down heads, women with worried eyes, children clinging to their skirts. Families stood in fields and sat by shacks, looking as worn out as the cars that had carried them from nowhere good to someplace worse.
Dating from the mid-1930s, the photographs were shot by Dorothea Lange, the renowned chronicler of migrant workers in California, experts say. If Lore's sister hadn't been poking through a cabinet stuffed with their father's old papers, the rare photos eventually would have wound up in the trash.
Now the collection, which could be worth thousands, may be sold to a major museum. And the mountain of letters, clippings and documents left behind by Lore's father, Elmer, a three-term state assemblyman who died in 1946, will be preserved for students of California history.
The 52 black-and-white photos were stashed in a file folder amid the assemblyman's memorabilia. In the last six decades, the collection had passed from Lore's mother to his older brother and then to him. It remained virtually untouched until his sister went through it in search of family history and came across the photos.
"I'd never heard of Dorothea Lange," said Lore, an 85-year-old retired surveyor. "I didn't know the photos were there and I was completely ignorant of them having any value at all."
A couple of years ago, Lore lent a few of the shots to a car-buff pal in Ventura who got a kick out of the Model Ts and other antique vehicles. Trying to get an idea of the photos' value, Lore's friend showed them around town. At a barbershop, they caught the eye of Frank Allison, a board member of Focus on the Masters, a nonprofit arts-education group founded by photographer Donna Granata.
When Granata saw the 8-by-10 prints, she recognized them as vintage photos, printed by the dozens shortly after the shots were made. On the back of many were lightly penciled captions. Almost all of them bore the stamp of FDR's Resettlement Administration, along with a reminder: "Kindly use the following photo credit: Lange."
"They were just extraordinary," she said. "I said, 'Please, don't handle these with your bare hands!' I gave him cotton gloves, an archive box, a whole crash course in archival procedure." The photos, which will be displayed this fall at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, were, in fact, relics.
