I was very excited today to get a new collection of photographs by my favorite photographer, Dorothea Lange, whose work is now being shown at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City.

Lange is best known for her classic Depression-era photo titled Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. 

She was a successful portrait photographer in San Francisco throughout the 1920s, but around 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, she began to photograph life outside of her studio.

She took some extraordinary photos of that time, a man turned away from the hungry crowds, his interlocked hands and set jaw a picture of despair, migrant workers in the fields, and in their shacks and tents.

The cover photo of her new book is vintage Lange, taken at a gas station in the Southwest: “This is your country: don’t let the big men take it away from  you.”

She began working for the Farm Security Administration and traveled around California, the Southwest, and the South to document the hardships of migrant farmers who had been driven out of their homes by the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

Migrant Mother, her iconic portrait of a starving and exhausted mother trying to feed her migrant children, was published in the San Francisco News on March 11, 1936, along with an editorial titled “What Does the ‘New Deal’ Mean To This Mother And Her Children?”

She also documented the internet of Japanese Americans during World War II. She used her photography to advance her idea of social justice until she died in 1965.

She was criticized by some women for leaving her two young children at home while she traveled but she kept on working, her commitment to her photography never wavered.

She urged photographers to pay less time to illusions and more to the reality of people’s lives. Her work is full of emotion and feeling that I strive very hard to replicate.

I can’t wait to take a couple of hours and sit down under a bright lamp in front of the woodstove and savor every page of this book.