The most famous photograph of the Great Depression is the size of a sheet of printer paper, and it was not the raw candid moment most people assume. Dorothea Lange physically scraped a thumb off the negative and directed the children in the frame to hide a teenage daughter. This episode recovers the biography of the woman in the tent, Florence Owens Thompson, born on a Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma in 1903, widowed with six children in 1931, and terrified that welfare authorities would take her kids.

We walk through the ten-minute encounter at the pea pickers' camp in Nipomo, California, in March 1936, the six frames Lange shot, and the editorial choices scholars James Curtis and Sally Stein have analyzed. We then follow the image's life in the public domain, from postage stamps to the Black Panthers, while Florence stayed anonymous unti ...