Dorothea Lange

[1895 1965 ]

Migrant Mother, c. 1936

 "Photography
Photography takes an instant out of time
time,
altering life by holding it still. Dorothea
Lange

 Her photographs humanized the tragic

consequences of the Great Depression
profoundly
y influenced the
and p
development of documentary
photography.
I had to get my camera to register things
that were more important than how poor
th were their
they
th i pride,
id th
their
i strength,
t
th their
th i
spirit. Dorothea Lange

 One
One should really use the camera as
though tomorrow youd be stricken blind.
To live a visual life is an enormous
undertaking, practically unattainable. Ive
only touched itit, just touched itit.
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 off the Great
G
Depression
and profoundly influenced the
development of documentary
photography.

 Born of second generation German

immigrants on May 26
26, 1895
1895, in Hoboken
Hoboken,
New Jersey,
Dorothea Lange was named Dorothea
Margaretta Nutzhorn at birth.
birth
Sh
She d
dropped
dh
her middle
iddl name and
d
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
limp.
"It formed
f
d me, guided
id d me, iinstructed
t t d me,
helped me and humiliated me," Lange
once said
id off h
her altered
lt d gait.
it "I'
"I've never
gotten over it, and I am aware of the force
and
d power off it."
it "

 Lange was educated in photography in

New York City, in a class taught by
Clarence H. White.
She was informally apprenticed to several
photography
g p y studios, including
g
New York p
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
Dixon,
with whom she had two sons.
One,
One born in 1925
1925, was named Daniel
Rhoades Dixon. The second child, born in
1929 was named John Eaglesfeather
1929,
Dixon.

 With the onset of the Great Depression,

Depression
Lange turned her camera lens from the
studio to the street
street.
H
Her studies
t di off unemployed
l
d and
dh
homeless
l
people captured the attention of local
photographers
h t
h
and
d lled
d tto h
her employment
l
t
with the federal Resettlement
Ad i i t ti (RA),
Administration
(RA) llater
t called
ll d th
the Farm
F
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
data,
photos.

 From 1935 to 1939, Lange's

Lange s work for the
RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor
g
p
particularly
y
and forgotten
sharecroppers, displaced farm families,
and migrant workers to public attention.
Distributed free to newspapers
p p
across the
country, her poignant images became
icons of the era.

 The image of a worn

worn, weather-beaten
weather beaten
woman, a look of desperation on her face,
two children leaning on her shoulders
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.
conditions

 The p
photograph
g p 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.
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
g beckoned her to p
postpone
p
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

off the
h experience:
i
"It
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
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
i db
by the
h rhythmic
h h i h
hum off the
h
windshield wipers, arose an inner argument:

 Dorothea
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
th ?
they?

 To turn back certainly is not necessary

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
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 wentt back
b k those
th
20 miles
il and
d tturned
d off
ff
the highway at that sign, PEA-PICKERS
CAMP.
CAMP

 I was following instinct

instinct, not reason;
I drove
d
iinto
t that
th t wett and
d soggy camp and
d
parked my car like a homing pigeon.

 I saw and approached the hungry and

desperate mother, as if drawn by a
magnet.
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
y had been living
g on frozen
that they
vegetables from the surrounding fields,
and birds that the children killed.
She had just sold the tires from her car to
buy food.

 There
There she sat in that lean-to
lean to tent with her
children huddled around her, and seemed
to know that my pictures might help her
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
exposure.
Th
The llastt was th
the close-up
l
view
i
off th
the
woman with three children that we now
k
know
as Migrant
Mi
tM
Mother.
th

 With that photograph

photograph, Lange achieved
what she had set out to do for the
Resettlement Association: to
to register the
things about those people that were more
important than how poor they were
were, she
explained, their pride, their strength,
their spirit
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
Lange
Dorothea, "The
The Assignment I'll
I ll Never
Forget: Migrant Mother,"
Popular Photography (February 1960);

 Migrant Mother does not take in a single

detail of the pea pickers campthe bleak
landscape and muddy ground
ground, the tattered
tents and dilapidated pickup trucks.

 Still
Still, the photograph evokes the
uncertainty and despair resulting from
continual poverty
poverty. The mothers
mother s furrowed
brow and deeply lined face make her look
much older than she is (thirty-two)
(thirty two).

 Her right hand touches the down-turned

down turned
corner of her mouth in an unconscious
gesture of anxiety
anxiety.

 Her sleeve is tattered and her dress

untidy;
Another of Langes photographs shows
th mother
the
th nursing
i th
the b
baby
b who
h now lilies
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
i a mute
in
t appeall ffor comfort,
f t but
b t she
h
seems as oblivious to them as she does to
L
Langes
camera.

 Lange herself knew only the outline of the

womans circumstances;
Lange never even learned her name, or
th t she
that
h was a ffull-blooded
ll bl d d A
American
i
Indian raised in Oklahoma, in the Indian
T it
Territory
off the
th Cherokee
Ch k N
Nation.
ti

 The images were made using a Graflex

camera. The original negatives are 4x5"
film.
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

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)
photo).

 According to Thompson's
Thompson s son,
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
workers.

 The morning after Lange visited the camp

camp,
she printed the photographs and took
them to the San Francisco News
News.

 They were published as illustrations to an

article recounting the plight of the destitute
pea pickers
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.
p
to action by
yp
pictures that revealed not
Spurred
the economic causes, but the human
consequences of poverty, the federal
government promptly
l sent twenty thousand
h
d
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

story

According
A
di tto M
Mrs. Th
Thompsons
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
road, the car timing chain snapped
and they coasted to a stop just inside a
pea-picker's
pea-picker
s camp on Nipomo Mesa
Mesa.
While Jim Hill, her husband, and two of
Thompson's
Thompson
s sons took the radiator
radiator, which
had also been damaged, to town for
epa , Thompson
o pso a
and
d so
some
eo
of tthe
e
repair,
children set up a temporary camp.

 As Thompson waited
waited, Dorothea Lange
Lange,
working for the Resettlement
Administration drove up and started
Administration,
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
them. I don't
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
o pso a
also
so cclaimed
a ed that
a Lange
a ge
promised the photos would never be
published,, but Lange
p
g 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
immediately,
2,500
500
to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in
Nipomo California
Nipomo,
California.

 Within days, the pea-picker camp received

20,000 pounds of food from the federal
government.

However
However, Thompson and her family had
moved on by the time the food arrived and
were working near Watsonville
Watsonville, California
California.

 While Thompson
Thompson's
s identity was not known
for over forty years after the photos were
taken the images became famous
taken,
famous. The
sixth image especially, which later became
known as Migrant Mother,
Mother "has
has achieved
near mythical status, symbolizing, if not
defining an entire era in [United States]
defining,
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
marvelous, but that was special
... . She is immortal."
As a whole, the photographs taken for the
Resettlement Administration "have been widely
h ld d as th
heralded
the epitome
it
off d
documentary
t
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
g and
24 of the Modesto Mobile Village
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
wouldn t sell the pictures
pictures. She said
she'd send me a copy. She never did.
Thompson
Thompson's
s daughter Katherine (to the left of
the frame) said in a December 2008 interview
that the p
photo's fame made the family
y feel
shame at their poverty.

 For all its power and effectiveness as a

documentary photograph, Migrant Mother
endures as a work of art
art.

 With the mother at the center of a

classically triangular composition and two
small heads on either side
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
ti
l use off thi
this photograph
h t
h tto th
the
neglect of her others, she was reminded
b a ffriend
by
i d th
thatt ti
time iis th
the greatest
t t off
editors, and the most reliable.

Other Works by Lange

First-graders
First graders, some of Japanese ancestry
ancestry,
at the Weill public school, San Francisco,
Calif pledging allegiance to the United
Calif.,
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
J
Japanese
d
descentt to
t evacuate
t from
f
certain
t i
West Coast areas. The owner, a University of
California graduate
graduate, will be housed with
hundreds of evacuees in War Relocation
Authorityy centers for the duration of the war