The Human Face of the Great Depression
Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange is one of the most famous documentary photographs of the 1930s. On assignment for the Resettlement Administration, Lange spent only ten minutes in a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. There she captured this image (though not the name) of the woman whose despair and resignation she so powerfully recorded. In the 1970s the woman was identified as Florence Thompson, a native Cherokee from Oklahoma, who disagreed with Lange’s recollections of the circumstances of the taking of the photograph. Thompson and her family had left Nipomo, however, by the time the publication of this image sparked a large relief effort directed at the camp’s migrant workers. Library of Congress.