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Cover. "Migrant Mother: 1936" by Dorothea Lange is one of the most famous and frequently-reproduced photographs in American history and is an icon of the Depression and its miseries. It was taken in a migrant labor camp in Nipomo, California, on a rainy March afternoon when Lange worked as a photographer in the historical section of the Resettlement Administration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had created this New Deal agency to aid the nation's most impoverished and victimized farmers. Lange and her colleagues worked in the tradition of reform-minded documentary photography pioneered some years earlier by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. Derided by some professional colleagues as "a bunch of sociologists with cameras," the Resettlement Administration's photographers succeeded in capturing the imagination and sympathy of the contemporary media and the American public. Midweek Pictorial published Lange's photograph in October 1936 under the title "Look in her Eyes!" and used it to illustrate the magazine's indictment of the inequities inherent in farm tenancy.

Theodore M. Brown and Elizabeth Fee

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