Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange’s images of the Great Depression preserved for posterity the individual pain and suffering of America’s worst economic crisis.

Her most famous photo, “Migrant Mother,” of a farmworker gazing into the distance while two of her children bury their heads on her shoulders with a third child sleeping on her lap, became an iconic depiction of the hardship so many Americans endured.

Lange described being drawn as if “by a magnet” to the “hungry and desperate mother,” who said she and the children had been living on birds and frozen vegetables from nearby fields.

“There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it,” Lange said.

She worked as a portrait photographer in San Francisco before taking her skills to the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. Lange traveled primarily around the American South and Southwest to document the struggles of migrant workers and displaced families.

“They have built homes here out of nothing,” Lange wrote. “These flimsy shacks represent many a last stand to maintain self-respect.”

Lange later accepted an assignment from the War Relocation Authority to document the internment of Japanese Americans. Her photos captured the human toll of the policy so hauntingly that the Army impounded them for more than 20 years.

— Cristina Marcos