In March 1936, Dorothea Lange, a photographer working for a US government agency, stopped at a camp of pea pickers in Nipomo, California. The crop had frozen and there was no work. She took a few photographs of a woman and her children in a lean-to tent, in about ten minutes.

One became the defining image of the Great Depression.

For decades, the woman was nameless. In the 1970s she was identified as Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven with Cherokee heritage. She had mixed feelings about the photo: it made her face famous around the world, while she received nothing from it. Her family later said the picture had made them feel ashamed of their poverty — and, eventually, proud of her strength.