Dorothea Lange
[1895 – 1965 ]
Migrant Mother, c. 1936
• "Photography takes an instant out of time,
altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea
Lange
• Her photographs humanized the tragic
consequences of the Great Depression
and profoundly influenced the
development of documentary photography.
• “I had to get my camera to register things
that were more important than how poor
they were – their pride, their strength, their
spirit.” – Dorothea Lange
• “One should really use the camera as
though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
To live a visual life is an enormous
undertaking, practically unattainable. I’ve
only touched it, just touched it.”
– Dorothea Lange
• “You force yourself onto strange streets,
among strangers. It may be very hot. It
may be painfully cold. It may be sandy and
windy and you say, ‘what am I doing here?
What drives me to do this hard thing?’”
• Wherever there was social upheaval, or
quiet suffering, Lange was there with a
compassionate eye to record and report.
• Dorothea Lange was an influential
American documentary photographer and
photojournalist,
• She is best known for her Depression-era
work for the Farm Security Administration
(FSA).
• Lange's photographs humanized the tragic
consequences of the Great Depression
and profoundly influenced the
development of documentary photography.
• Born of second generation German
immigrants on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken,
New Jersey,
• Dorothea Lange was named Dorothea
Margaretta Nutzhorn at birth.
• She dropped her middle name and
assumed her mother's maiden name after
her father abandoned the family when she
was 12 years old, one of two traumatic
incidents in her early life.
• The other was her contraction of polio at
age seven which left her with a weakened
right leg and a permanent limp.
• "It formed me, guided me, instructed me,
helped me and humiliated me," Lange
once said of her altered gait. "I've never
gotten over it, and I am aware of the force
and power of it."
• Lange was educated in photography in
New York City, in a class taught by
Clarence H. White.
• She was informally apprenticed to several
New York photography studios, including
that of the famed Arnold Genthe.
• In 1918, she moved to San Francisco, and
by the following year she had opened a
successful portrait studio.
• She lived across the bay in Berkeley for
the rest of her life. In 1920, she married
the noted western painter Maynard Dixon,
with whom she had two sons.
• One, born in 1925, was named Daniel
Rhoades Dixon. The second child, born in
1929, was named John Eaglesfeather
Dixon.
• With the onset of the Great Depression,
Lange turned her camera lens from the
studio to the street.
• Her studies of unemployed and homeless
people captured the attention of local
photographers and led to her employment
with the federal Resettlement
Administration (RA), later called the Farm
Security Administration (FSA).
• In December 1935, she divorced Dixon and
married agricultural economist Paul Schuster
Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University
of California, Berkeley.
• Taylor educated Lange in social and political
matters, and together they documented rural
poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers
and migrant laborers for the next five years —
Taylor interviewing and gathering economic
data, Lange taking photos.
• From 1935 to 1939, Lange's work for the
RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor
and forgotten — particularly
sharecroppers, displaced farm families,
and migrant workers — to public attention.
• Distributed free to newspapers across the
country, her poignant images became
icons of the era.
• The image of a worn, weather-beaten
woman, a look of desperation on her face,
two children leaning on her shoulders, an
infant in her lap; has become a
photographic icon of the Great Depression
in America.
• The photo was taken in March 1936 at a
camp for seasonal agricultural workers
175 miles north of Los Angeles by
Dorothea Lange.
• Lange was working for the Farm Security
Administration as part of a team of
photographers documenting the impact of
federal programs in improving rural
conditions.
• The photograph that has become known as
"Migrant Mother" is one of a series of
photographs that Dorothea Lange made of
Florence Owens Thompson and her children in
February or March of 1936 in Nipomo,
California.
• Her husband was from California.
• Lange was concluding a month's trip
photographing migratory farm labor around the
state for what was then the Resettlement
Administration.
• As Lange was finishing the photographic
assignment and was driving back home in
a wind-driven rain when she came upon a
sign for the camp.
• Something beckoned her to postpone her
journey home and enter the camp.
• She was immediately drawn to the woman
and took a series of six shots - the only
photos she took that day. The woman was
the mother of seven children and on the
brink of starvation.
In 1960, Lange gave this account
of the experience:
• "It was raining, the camera bags were packed,
and I had on the seat beside me in the car the
results of my long trip, the box containing all
those rolls and packs of exposed film ready to
mail back to Washington. It was a time of relief.
• Sixty-five miles an hour for seven hours would
get me home to my family that night, and my
eyes were glued to the wet and gleaming
highway that stretched out ahead. I felt freed, for
I could lift my mind off my job and think of home.
• I was on my way and barely saw a crude sign
with pointing arrow which flashed by at the side
of the road, saying PEA-PICKERS CAMP.
• But out of the corner of my eye I did see it I
didn't want to stop, and didn't.
• I didn't want to remember that I had seen it, so I
drove on and ignored the summons. Then,
accompanied by the rhythmic hum of the
windshield wipers, arose an inner argument:
• Dorothea, how about that camp back
there? What is the situation back there?
• Are you going back?
• Nobody could ask this of you, now could
they?
• To turn back certainly is not necessary.
• Haven't you plenty of negatives already on
this subject?
• Isn't this just one more of the same?
• Besides, if you take a camera out in this
rain, you're just asking for trouble. Now be
reasonable, etc. etc., etc.
Making a U-Turn…
• Having well convinced myself for 20 miles
that I could continue on, I did the opposite.
• Almost without realizing what I was doing I
made a U-turn on the empty highway.
• I went back those 20 miles and turned off
the highway at that sign, PEA-PICKERS
CAMP.
• I was following instinct, not reason;
• I drove into that wet and soggy camp and
parked my car like a homing pigeon.
• 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 32. 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.”
• In the space of ten minutes Lange
photographed the squalid scene, moving
closer to her subject with each exposure.
• The last was the close-up view of the
woman with three children that we now
know as Migrant Mother.
• With that photograph, Lange achieved
what she had set out to do for the
Resettlement Association: “to register the
things about those people that were more
important than how poor they were,” she
explained, “—their pride, their strength,
their spirit.”
• The pea crop at Nipomo had frozen and
there was no work for anybody.
• But I did not approach the tents and
shelters of other stranded pea-pickers. It
was not necessary; I knew I had recorded
the essence of my assignment."
Reference:
Lange, Dorothea, "The Assignment I'll Never
Forget: Migrant Mother,"
Popular Photography (February 1960);
• Migrant Mother does not take in a single
detail of the pea pickers’ camp—the bleak
landscape and muddy ground, the tattered
tents and dilapidated pickup trucks.
• Still, the photograph evokes the
uncertainty and despair resulting from
continual poverty. The mother’s furrowed
brow and deeply lined face make her look
much older than she is (thirty-two).
• Her right hand touches the down-turned
corner of her mouth in an unconscious
gesture of anxiety.
• Her sleeve is tattered and her dress
untidy;
• Another of Lange’s photographs shows
the mother nursing the baby who now lies
sleeping in her lap.
• Evidently she has done all she can for her
family and has nothing left to offer.
• The older children press against her body
in a mute appeal for comfort, but she
seems as oblivious to them as she does to
Lange’s camera.
• Lange herself knew only the outline of the
woman’s circumstances;
• Lange never even learned her name, or
that she was a full-blooded American
Indian raised in Oklahoma, in the Indian
Territory of the Cherokee Nation.
• The images were made using a Graflex
camera. The original negatives are 4x5"
film.
• It is not possible to determine on the basis
of the negative numbers (which were
assigned later at the Resettlement
Administration) the order in which the
photographs were taken.
• The original photo featured Florence's
thumb and index finger on the tent pole,
but the image was later retouched to hide
Florence's thumb. Her index finger was left
untouched (lower right in photo).
• According to Thompson's son, Lange got
some details of this story wrong, but the
impact of the picture was based on the
image showing the strength and need of
migrant workers.
• The morning after Lange visited the camp,
she printed the photographs and took
them to the San Francisco News.
• They were published as illustrations to an
article recounting the plight of the destitute
pea pickers, and the story was repeated in
newspapers throughout the nation.
• The photographs were shocking: it was
unconscionable that the workers who put
• food on American tables could not feed
themselves.
• Spurred to action by pictures that revealed not
the economic causes, but the human
consequences of poverty, the federal
government promptly sent twenty thousand
pounds of food to California migrant workers.
• The photos' wider impact included
influencing John Steinbeck in the writing of
his novel The Grapes of Wrath.
So this is the rest of the story…
• According to Mrs. Thompson’s son
• In March 1936, after picking beets in the
Imperial Valley, Thompson and her family
were traveling on US Highway 101
towards Watsonville in hopes of finding
more work.
• On the road, the car timing chain snapped
and they coasted to a stop just inside a
pea-picker's camp on Nipomo Mesa.
• While Jim Hill, her husband, and two of
Thompson's sons took the radiator, which
had also been damaged, to town for
repair, Thompson and some of the
children set up a temporary camp.
• As Thompson waited, Dorothea Lange,
working for the Resettlement
Administration, drove up and started
taking photos of Florence and her family.
• Over 10 minutes she took 6 images.
• Thompson claimed that Lange never asked her
any questions and got many of the details
incorrect. Troy Owens recounted:
– "There's no way we sold our tires, because we didn't
have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the
Hudson and we drove off in them. I don't believe
Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one
story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to
fill in what she didn't have."
• Thompson also claimed that Lange
promised the photos would never be
published, but Lange sent them to the San
Francisco News as well as to the
Resettlement Administration in
Washington, D.C.
• The News ran the pictures almost
immediately, with an assertion that 2,500
to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in
Nipomo, California.
• Within days, the pea-picker camp received
20,000 pounds of food from the federal
government.
• However, Thompson and her family had
moved on by the time the food arrived and
were working near Watsonville, California.
• While Thompson's identity was not known
for over forty years after the photos were
taken, the images became famous. The
sixth image especially, which later became
known as Migrant Mother, "has achieved
near mythical status, symbolizing, if not
defining, an entire era in [United States]
history."
• Roy Stryker called Migrant Mother the
"ultimate" photo of the Depression Era. "[Lange]
never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture …
The others were marvelous, but that was special
... . She is immortal."
• As a whole, the photographs taken for the
Resettlement Administration "have been widely
heralded as the epitome of documentary
photography.“
• Edward Steichen described them as "the most
remarkable human documents ever rendered in
pictures."
• It was only in the late 1970s that
Thompson's identity was discovered.
• In 1978, acting on a tip, Modesto Bee
reporter Emmett Corrigan located
Thompson at her mobile home in Space
24 of the Modesto Mobile Village and
recognized her from the 40-year-old
photograph.
• A letter Thompson wrote was published in The
Modesto Bee and the Associated Press sent a
story around entitled "Woman Fighting Mad
Over Famous Depression Photo.“
• Florence was quoted as saying "I wish she
[Lange] hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a
penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She
said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said
she'd send me a copy. She never did.“
• Thompson's daughter Katherine (to the left of
the frame) said in a December 2008 interview
that the photo's fame made the family feel
shame at their poverty.
• For all its power and effectiveness as a
documentary photograph, Migrant Mother
endures as a work of art.
• With the mother at the center of a
classically triangular composition and two
small heads on either side, the image
bears the iconic emotional and symbolic
character of a classical monument or a
Renaissance Madonna.
• Yet Lange herself could never understand
its particular appeal.
• When she once complained about the
continual use of this photograph to the
neglect of her others, she was reminded
by a friend that “time is the greatest of
editors, and the most reliable.”
Other Works by Lange
• First-graders, some of Japanese ancestry,
at the Weill public school, San Francisco,
Calif., pledging allegiance to the United
States flag.
• The evacuees of Japanese ancestry will
be housed in War relocation authority
centers for the duration of the war
• San Francisco, Calif., Mar. 1942. A large sign
reading "I am an American" placed in the
window of a store, at 13th and Franklin streets,
on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. The
store was closed following orders to persons of
Japanese descent to evacuate from certain
West Coast areas. The owner, a University of
California graduate, will be housed with
hundreds of evacuees in War Relocation
Authority centers for the duration of the war
• What do you first notice when you look at
this picture?
• What do you notice about their clothing?
Essay Question 1
• In the final photo of the day, Lange
focuses on the mother and her children.
• What does she not show?
Essay Question 2
• Why would the Resettlement
Administration want these photographs
rather than just words or statistics ?
Essay Question 3
• When this photograph was published in
newspapers, how did Americans respond
to it? (What were their emotions and
subsequent actions ?)