White Angel Breadline, San Francisco

San Francisco, 1933, by Dorothea Lange. In a crowd of men waiting for food, all hats and turned backs, one older man in a battered hat leans on a wooden rail with his hands clasped beside a tin cup, his face turned down. Lange found the breadline not far from her studio, made the picture on her first day photographing there, and later called it one of her most famous. Taken two years before she joined the federal photographers, it shows the eye for a single face in a crowd that she brought to all her Depression work.