Dorothea Lange

In March 1936, Dorothea Lange pulled off a California highway near Nipomo and walked toward a group of migrant workers camped in a field of frozen peas. She made five exposures before approaching a 32-year-old woman named Florence Owens Thompson, who was nursing an infant with her older children pressed against her shoulders and her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the lens. The photograph became known as "Migrant Mother." It is arguably the most recognized documentary image in American history, and Lange later said she made it in less than ten minutes.

Lange was working for the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency that hired photographers to document rural poverty and build public support for federal relief programs. She had come to documentary work after years as a successful portrait photographer in San Francisco; the breadlines she could see from her studio window in the early 1930s pulled her outside and permanently redirected her practice. The FSA project she joined alongside Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and others ultimately produced over 170,000 images — the most comprehensive visual record of Depression-era America ever assembled.

Lange's wartime assignment extended her legacy into more troubling territory. Commissioned by the Army to photograph Japanese American families being transported to internment camps following Pearl Harbor, she documented what she saw with the same unflinching clarity she had brought to FSA work. The Army suppressed many of those photographs. They were not published until decades after her death, and they stand now as critical evidence of one of the gravest civil liberties failures in American history.