Dorothea lange biography great depression migrant mother

It’s one of the most iconic photos in American history. A woman in ragged clothing holds a baby as two more children huddle close, hiding their faces behind her shoulders. The mother squints into the distance, one hand lifted to her mouth and anxiety etched deep in the lines on her face.

From the moment it first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco newspaper in March 1936, the image known as “Migrant Mother” came to symbolize the hunger, poverty and hopelessness endured by so many Americans during the Great Depression.

Dorothea lange biography great depression migrant mother death

The photographer Dorothea Lange had taken the shot, along with a series of others, days earlier in a camp of migrant farm workers in Nipomo, California.

Lange was working for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration—later the Farm Security Administration (FSA)—the New Deal-era agency created to help struggling farm workers.

She and other FSA photographers would take nearly 80,000 photogr