“Photography takes an instant out of time,” said Dorothea Lange, “altering life by holding it still.” We’ve all seen her 1936 portrait of the migrant mother with two children, taken in Nipomo, California, and capturing the dashed hopes and hardship brought by the Great Depression. In Milan, the Museo Diocesano is exhibiting 140 of Lange’s photographs, most of them from the 1930s. The 1929 Wall Street crash and its aftermath shaped Lange’s life and career, prompting her to shift from studio portraiture to the documentation of poverty and social injustice. She worked with the Farm Security Administration, which promoted New Deal Policies. Lange not only lets us see American history, her photographs pin it down, as fact. —Carolina de Armas