The Crucial Years

by Dorothea Lange

These are famous photographs. Lange looked out of her window in San Francisco one day and saw the employed workers lined for food. She ends up working for the Farm Security Administration and her job was to take pictures. The Great Depression was not just an economic catastrophe but it coincided with a terrible drought. So, Dorothea Lange ends up taking pictures for the FSA of people travelling from Oklahoma to California to find work and escape the drought – Okies, they were called.