DOROTHEA LANGE: AMERICAN MASTERS (STREAMING AT PBS)

Lange at work during the Great Depression.
Photograph by her husband, economist Paul S. Taylor, 1934

The photograph of the dog stand, above, was taken by Dorothea Lange in October 1939 while she was under contract with the Farm Security Administration, a federal agency that hired photographers to document American rural life during the Great Depression. This stand was on U.S. highway 99 in Lane County, Williamette Valley, Oregon. Lange is considered one of the great American photographers, best known for her documentary photographs of rural Americans in the 1930s. A good place to start to learn more about Lange is this video, "Dorothea Lange's Documentary Photographs," from the Getty Museum. 

Her best known photograph, shown below, is "Migrant Mother," whose subject is Florence Thompson, a 32-year-old widow and farm worker during the Great Depression. It was taken in Nipomo, California in 1936. Four videos at YouTube--Lange's "Migrant Mother" (2:11), CSPAN's Story of "Migrant Mother" (4:09), Lange: An American Odyssey (37:46), and Lange: "Migrant Mother" (23:07)--present reports on Lange and the photograph, an important visual document of 20th Century America. You can find more photographs by Lange at this Library of Congress website. Check this site, too, for more photographs by Lange.

PBS broadcast Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning (preview) on Friday, August 29th, 2014, at 9 PM. A trailer for the program appears above. If you missed the broadcast, you can now stream it.  Click here to stream the whole program. 

Her life is reported by bio. Read some of Dorothea Lange's words on photography at Dodho. a magazine of photography. 

Brainpickings presents the story of how Lange's "Migrant Mother" came to be. Read "The Story Behind the Iconic 'Migrant Mother' Photograph and How Dorothea Lange Almost Didn’t Take It" The U.S. Library of Congress Farm Security Administration archive is home to many photos that Lange took when visiting with Florence Thompson, the "Migrant Mother." You may be interested in reading an excerpt from No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. The photograph also inspired Marissa Silver to write her novel, Mary Coin. NPR gave it a good review,  as did the Los Angeles Times. 

The photograph, "Migrant Mother," is of Florence Thompson, 32, and is part of the
Library of Congress collection. Lange took the photograph of Thompson
and three of her seven children in 1936, in a pea picking field in Nipomo, California.