Plantation Overseer and his Field Hands, Mississippi Delta

Dorothea Lange produced indelible images of the Great Depression while working for US government agencies in the 1930s. In 1936 she made her first trip to the American South with her husband, economics professor Paul Taylor (seen at the very left side of the photograph), who interviewed locals and took notes while she photographed. Lange found the often-racist social order of the South intact despite the upheavals of the Depression. She made that power structure clear in this frequently reproduced image, in which a heavyset plantation owner stakes claim to his car and his employees at once, straddling the bumper as he looms before people who he seems to regard as his possessions.