Author(s): Dorothea Lange (By (photographer)); Sarah Hermanson Meister (Text by)

Photography

The United States was in the midst of the Depression when photographer Dorothea Lange, a portrait-studio owner, began documenting the country_s rampant poverty. Her depictions of unemployed men wandering the streets of San Francisco gained the attention of one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt_s New Deal agencies, the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), and she started photographing the rural poor under its auspices. Her images triggered a pivotal public recognition of the lives of sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers. One day in Nipomo, California, Lange recalled, she _saw and approached [a] hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet._ The woman_s name was Frances Owens Thompson, and the result of their encounter was five exposures, including Migrant Mother , which would become an iconic piece of documentary photography.