Some things you do get a life of their own,” Dorothea Lange once told an interviewer. “They cut loose from the person who made them.” She was referring to her photograph Migrant Mother, in which she distilled the collective trauma of the Great Depression into a single, hauntingly intimate portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, a sharecropper’s wife.

Taken in 1936, it became one of the most famous images of the 20th century, but the way it came to define her work made Lange ambivalent about the role – and limits – of documentary photography. Read More