In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Historical Division of the Farm Security Administration with a goal of documenting the individuals, families, and environments impacted by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Photographers including Dorothea Lange were commissioned to interview and photograph the poverty, hardships, and resiliency of the rural American people. These photographer’s portraits of rural families, painful living conditions, and struggling workers deeply resonated with the American people. Lange’s best-known image, Migrant Mother, was taken during this project and was widely circulated throughout the country in magazines and newspapers as a symbol of the plight of American farm workers during the Great Depression.

A similarly powerful portrait, the present work exemplifies Lange's ability to convey the intense emotion felt by her subjects. Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle shows a striking portrait of Nettie Featherston against the low horizon of the Texas landscape. The sun shines on her stressed body language, pained expression, and her worn clothing. At this angle, Featherston's slender form becomes elongated. The harsh environmental disaster is reflected in the bleakness of the background, while the wide open sky shines a light on the subject. Gripped with frustration and exasperation, the image is a powerful emblem of the plight of numerous farmworkers throughout the American West.

Other impressions of this image are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., among others.

Born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange survived polio during childhood that left her with a permanent limp in her right leg, an event which she cited as shaping her worldview and career. She went on to study photography at Columbia University in New York, later settling in San Francisco in 1918 where she operated a successful portrait studio. Lange’s time documenting the effects of the Great Depression with the Farm Security Administration solidified her status as a pioneer American artist and showed the power of photography to stimulate institutional change and political action. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941, marking the first time the prestigious fellowship was awarded to a woman. Lange was also integral in helping Edward Steichen recruit photographers for his landmark 1955 exhibition “The Family of Man” at The Museum of Modern Art during his tenure as Director of Photography at the Museum. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among many others. Lange died on October 11, 1965 in San Francisco, CA.