Unemployed, Howard Street, San Francisco, February 1939

Lange’s difficult youth played an important role in forming her values as a person and an artist—from paralysis in one of her legs from polio, to her father abandoning the family (Lange was her mother’s maiden name). She opened her first studio in San Francisco in 1919 at age 24, befriending the photographer Imogen Cunningham. Following the 1929 stock market crash, Lange turned her attention from the studio to the streets, documenting the experiences of the unhoused, unemployed, and hungry, both in the urban and the rural United States, emphasizing her subjects’ dignity and resilience.

Lange’s photographs of unemployed people and migrant workers, taken for the Farm Security Administration (FSA; prior to 1937, the Resettlement Administration), are among the most poignant and emblematic of the devastating effects of the Great Depression. She published her work from this period in the book American Exodus (1939), with texts by her husband, the economist Paul Schuster Taylor.