Existing comment:
Dorothea Lange
Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California. 1936
In 1936, Dorothea Lange met Florence Owens Thompson in a California camp of field workers whose livelihoods had been devastated by crop failure. Lange's timeless photograph of the forlorn migrant mother and her children came to represent a generation and a nation that seemed to have lost its way. Published widely in magazines and newspapers, Lange's documentary photography for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) humanized the Depression's consequences. She had been operating a successful San Francisco portrait studio, but moved by the homeless and unemployed, began capturing images of the urban scene that reflected her social concerns. |