Lange's photography reveals a particular sensitivity to the body's gestures and postures. Sally Stein has suggested that the photographer 'viewed the trials of the Great Depression as something registered and grappled with first and foremost in the body'. It is tempting to see this sensitivity to the body as linked to the legacy of her illness--a bout of polio in her childhood had left her with a pronounced limp. In the early 1960s she described the impact of her handicap:' it formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me.' In later life, Lange was debilitated by serious and extended bouts of ulcers and oesophagitis, her illness interrupting and preventing many of her planned projects.

Life (Roy) Stryker, Lange believed that photography was a tool of political action. It could and did effect change. As soon as she had printed the negatives, she went to tell the City Editor of the San Francisco News of the migrants' plight. He notified United Press and on 10 March the News ran a report that the federal government was rushing in 20,000 pounds of food to feed the hungry migrants at the camp. Alongside the headline ran two of Lange's pictures, but not the now famous photograph. 

In her account of picturing the migrant mother, Lange refers to taking five photographs, 'working closer and closer from the same director'. In fact, she took six pictures, submitting five to Stryker and withholding one, probably for aesthetic reasons. James C. Curtis suggests that it was a trial shot, made soon after she got her equipment out of her car, a means of easing her subjects into posing for their portrait session. Considering these images in terms of a series culminating in the well-known portrtait of the migrant mother, one gets the sense both of a careful arrangement of the mother and her children and the progressive editing out of distracting and seemingly irrelevant details. The particularities of context are erased to achieve a more abstract and thereby universal representation of poverty.


The social unrest and unemployment of the Depression ended with America's preparation for war. On 19 February 1942 President Roosevelt signed the now infamous Executive Order 9066, which allowed military commanders to set up military zones wherever they thought necessary and gave them the power to remove anyone they wanted from these areas. A few weeks later, there was an order that all persons of Japanese descent must leave the Pacific Coast military areas: 110,000 men, women and children were told to report the evacuation in Northern California. She strongly opposed the removal of these people from their homes. According to critic A. D. Coleman, the photographs she made of the evacuation were some of her 'most poignant and angry pictures'. He compared them to her images of the Depression, revealing 'her concern with the survival of human dignity under impossible circumstances'. Showing the quiet patience of these families in such dehumanizing conditions, the photographers function as a powerful exposure of American racism and wartime hysteria.