“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?” Marking 80 years since the publication of John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ with Dorothea Lange, whose images of displaced Americans during the Great Depression have become bound up with the novel’s evocation of their struggle. Her most famous picture, which has become known as ‘Migrant Mother’, shows Florence Owens Thompson with three of her children in 1936. A farm labourer, her family were travelling across the country looking for work when their car broke down. Sheltering in a pea-pickers camp, some 2,500 -3,500 people were stranded there after coming for work and being let down by the crop. It summarised the plight of those Dustbowl Americans for whom the very land they lived by had given up on them. Commissioned by the extensive Farm Security Administration project, Lange’s image realised the brief; after publication, public sympathy sped government aid to the camp and prevented further starvatio...