Dorothea Lange 1936 Migrant Mother
(Note: the woman is breast-feeding her child)

Dorothea Lange 1936 Depression Photos 
entitled Migrant Mother

Born Dorothea Nutzhorn New Jersey May 26, 1895. Dorothea developed polio  at age 7 which left her right leg with a permanent limp. When she was 12 years old, her father abandoned her mother, leading her to adopt her mother's maiden name.

Dorothea Lange studied photography under Clarence H. White. She was informally apprenticed to several New York photography studios, including that of the famed Arnold Genthe. In 1918, she moved to San Francisco, where she opened a successful portrait studio.

With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration

In December 1935, she divorced Dixon and married agricultural economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor educated Lange in social and political matters, and together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years.

From 1935-1939, Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor sharecroppers, displaced farm families and migrant workers to public attention. Dorothea Lange's  poignant images became icons of the era. Dorothea Lange's 1936, Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson better know as "Migrant Mother" is most certainly Lange's  best-known photograph