IN 1936 Dorothea Lange was working on a photographic assignment for the Farm Security Administration to document the harsh rural conditions affecting America's farm workers. On her way home from a long day of shooting, Lange drove past a pea-pickers' camp outside Los Angeles. She was anxious to get home, but stopped anyway and spoke briefly with a woman in the camp. She took six photos. One them, which she would call "Migrant Mother, 1936" (pictured), showed the worried-looking woman sitting in a lean-to tent, infant in her lap, children on either side, all of them starving in the middle of a crop freeze. The image, printed in newspapers across the country, helped bring national attention to the issues facing displaced farm workers. It also made Lange's name.
Originally a portrait photographer, she had ventured into street photography as the Depression began to unfold. "White Angel Breadline, San Francisco", a picture she took in 1933 of people waiting at a soup kitchen not far from her studio, would set her off on a new course of what she would call "trying to get lost". She would go on to photograph sharecroppers in the American south, California's Japanese internment camps during the second world war, the building of the Monticello Dam and a wide array of landscapes and interiors, and would help establish the first department of fine-art photography at the California School of Fine Arts.