Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange's iconic image that represents the hardship of the Great Depression to so many, is one of the most famous photographs ever taken. Roy Emerson Stryker was the brains behind what became known as the Farm Services Administration (FSA) project. Stryker's goal was to show the Congress that thousands of dispossessed farm families were desperately in need of government assistance. The very act of photographing people living in difficult circumstances, while trying to understand and to explain the crisis, created a new kind of photographic project.

Dorothea Lange, one of many FSA photographers, had begun photographing migrants in 1935 for Paul Taylor's report on the subject. Stryker saw the report and hired Lange to continue the documentation of migrants to demonstrate that migration was not an isolated incident but an authentic economic catastrophe with an impact far beyond the borders of California.

In 1960, Lange gave this account of her experience in taking the images:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, which was thirty-two.

Whatever the 32 year old woman, Florence Owens Thompson, thought of Lange's actions at the time, she came to regret that Lange ever made the photographs, which she felt permanently colored her with a "Grapes of Wrath" stereotype. Thompson, a Native American from Oklahoma, had already lived in California for a decade when Lange photographed her. Lange provided the images to the San Francisco News along with the story of how the migrants were starving to death. UPI picked it up and within days the federal government supplied the camp with 20,000 pounds of food. Thompson and her family had already moved on before the food arrived.