It’s 1936, America is still reeling from the effects of the great depression and Dorothea Lange is returning home from her latest assignment, documenting the hardships of farmers in the dustbowls of California and Oklahoma.

Lange is most of the way home when she has a feeling, a compulsion as she’s describes it, to turn around and return to the pea pickers farm she passed 20 miles back.

And it’s there, she discovers, and makes the image, Migrant mother. Unbeknownst to Lange and her subject an image which would become the symbol of desperation, of motherhood and of the state of working class Americans in the 1930’s.