# @gettyimages on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BwO1GS6nPRZ
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16448089-gettyimages-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/edbe092e2a.jpg
- **Posted:** 2019-04-14T09:56:31.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Getty Images (@GettyImages) — https://gondola.cc/GettyImages

## Caption

“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 starvation.
The kinship between Lange’s images and Steinbeck’s words illustrates that particular time but also speaks to today, insisting that the dispossessed be considered with all humanity; that there are stories behind their current plight.
In a letter from Steinbeck to Lange before her death in 1965, he writes: “There have been great ones in my time and I have been privileged to know some of them and surely you are among the giants. And if I, who am not religious, offer my prayers for you, it is because God did not beget prayers - prayers created Gods - and kept them in their places too. Bless you! 
And thank you again for remembering...How I wish I may do it as gallantly as you.”
📷: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images | gettyarchive 
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#thegrapesofwrath #johnsteinbeck #dorothealange #migrantmother #socialdocumentary #photojournalism #gettyarchive

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## Tags

thegrapesofwrath, socialdocumentary, photojournalism, dorothealange, migrantmother, gettyarchive, johnsteinbeck

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