The subject of this compassionate portrait of the “hungry and desperate mother,” as Lange described her, was later identified as Florence Owens Thompson. Lange photographed her and her children at a pea-pickers camp on the southern California coast. In 2003, photography historian Sally Stein brought Thompson’s identity as a Cherokee from Oklahoma to the forefront—a fact that had been known but largely ignored since 1979. Thompson is not the mythic white matriarch that she symbolizes for so many, but rather, as Stein argues, a symbol of the Euro-American tendency to misrecognize Native Americans and suppress racial identity. Stein’s research also revealed the explicit directives, given to Dorothea Lange and other photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration (a New Deal agency created to address rural poverty during the Great Depression), not to photograph Native Americans.

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