Dorothea Lange moved to San Francisco in 1918, where she started her career as a portrait photographer, drawing a mostly elite clientele. After the collapse of the stock market, her business declined. She left her studio to photograph the devastating impacts of the Depression. Her photographs caught the eye of Paul Taylor, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who hired Lange to work for the California State Emergency Relief Administration in 1935 and later encouraged colleagues in the Farm Security Administration to do the same. Lange soon married Taylor, beginning their years-long partnership.