Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle

From 1935 to 1939, Dorothea Lange worked for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration, tasked with recording the lives of Americans hit hardest by the double punch of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Her moving portrait of Nettie Featherston, slender and destitute against the backdrop of the Texas high plains, is emblematic of the era’s depleted land, bodies, and spirits. Nettie’s solitary despair, like the uncaring landscape that surrounds her, is inescapable. Produced under Lange’s supervision shortly before her death, this exceptionally large print was made for her solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.