'Migrant Mother' photographer's images of oppressed resonate

(AP) — Dorothea Lange was driving by a pea pickers' camp on the California coast when she stumbled across a weary mother and her many children huddled in a lean-to.

The image she titled "Migrant Mother" became the late photographer's most famous work, capturing the dirt and despair of that era through the eyes of a 32-year-old woman who had just sold her car tires for food.

The photograph, digitally scanned and enlarged, is a dominant feature of a new exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California called Dorothea Lange:

The forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during WWII echoes today's debate over proposed travel bans, he said, and her postwar work on changing cities precedes battles over gentrification in places like San Francisco and Oakland.

Lange was known as a photographer of great empathy, someone who spent time with her subjects and took meticulous notes of their lives for detailed photo captions.

Ken Light, a social documentary photographer and photojournalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says if Lange was alive today, she would be documenting homeless tent cities, the U.S.-Mexico border and poverty in California's Central Valley.