In 1936, while on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, the American photographer Dorothea Lange met Florence Owens, a 32-year-old Cherokee mother who worked at a pea-pickers camp in Nipomo, California. Her portrait of Owens eloquently evoked the plight of migrant workers and their families, and remains one of the most recognizable and referenced photos of the era. In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her photographic achievements during the Depression—a fellowship she ultimately turned down so that she could document the internment of Japanese Americans, initiated by executive order after the attack on Pearl Harbor. These photographs, alongside Lange’s Depression-era works, are on view in a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. —Paulina Prosnitz