Nature's Pencil: Inspiration: Dorothea Lange
This picture, Migrant Mother, is one of the best known images in photography. It is great. But you don't need me to tell you that.
The un-named subject, a victim of the 1930's depression, is just 32 years old. She and her children were living in a tent, and barely surviving on whatever food - vegetables, wild birds - they could find in the frozen fields.
Lange was born in 1885 in New Jersey, and was studying to become a teacher when she discovered photography. She studied with Clarence White at Columbia then opened her own portrait studio in San Francisco. In the 1930's she started to use her camera to record the plight of San Franscisco's poor in the depression. Her photographs were noticed by Paul Taylor, an Economics professor and social activist, and she started to work with him.
In 1935 she was recruited to Roy Stryker's team of photographers in the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration or FSA. Along with Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Russel Lee, and Carl Mydans she produced some of the finest ever social documentary, including this picture.
Lange left full time work with the unit in 1937, though she continued to do occasional work for it until it was disbanded in 1942. She continued to work and exhibit right up to her death in 1965.