"
Migrant Mother" is one of a series of
photographs taken by
Dorothea Lange in February or
March of
1936 in
Nipomo,
California, while on assignment photographing
migratory farm labor around the state for what was
then the
Resettlement Administration. You've seen this photo. It has become an
icon of
the Great Depression: a mother, surrounded by her
hungry children, all of them
dirty, her hand to her face, looking off into the distance with an expression of weary
hopelessness.
1
In the Feb 1960 issue of Popular Photography, Lange gave this account of the experience:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my
presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and
closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said
that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold
the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know
that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.
Though Lange says she didn't ask the woman's name and history, they are known: Her name was
Florence Thompson, and she was living with four of her seven children at the pea-pickers' camp where she was photographed. She was not, as is commonly
assumed, one of the millions of whites
displaced by the
depression: She was
Cherokee.
Though Lange seems to imply that the photo was taken spontaneously, it wasn't: She rearranged the children, excluding a teenage daughter, and coached Thompson on how to look weary, asking her to raise her hand to her face.
That Lange says "there was a sort of equality about it" is especially strange: The photo became Lange's most famous work, and its almost constant reprinting (it is still the most requested reprint of any photo in the Library of Congress) earned her fortune and fame. Florence Thompson, on the other hand, died of cancer forty-seven miles from those same pea fields, speechless after a stroke, penniless and uninsured.
Don't get me wrong: I still think it's a great photo.
1 If you still don't know the photo I mean, you can see it at http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/128_migm.html