Customer Reviews

Migrant Mother, c.1936 Education Art Poster Print by Dorothea Lange, 23x32

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The famous photograph that is now known as "Migrant Mother" was one of a series of photographs taken by Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) for what was then the Resettlement Administration in early (February or March) 1936 in Nipmo, California. Lange had been traveling around the state for a month photographing migratory farm labor. In 1960 the photographer gave an account of how she came to take this haunting photography of a hungry and desperate mother. She made six exposures of which this was the closest (three are more medium shots and the other two show the entire lean-to tent structure in the field), although we have no way of knowing in what order the pictures were taken. Lange remembered that she did not ask the woman's name or history, but learned she was thirty-two and that the family had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that her children had killed. Having just sold the tires from her car to buy food, she sat in a lean-to tent with her children huddled about her.

The photograph was taken with a Graflex camera and the original negatives are 4 x 5 inch film. The original caption reads "Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936" (four other shots are all dated March 1936 in their captions). The caption of one of the other photographs provides the additional details: "the father is a native Californian. Destitute in a pea pickers camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute." The "San Francisco News" published one of the photographs (not the famous one), along with a story demanding food for the pea pickers.

In this photograph the mother cradles a baby in her lap while a pair of young children cling to both sides, their faces turned away from the camera. Although the woman faces Lange's camera her eyes are averted to look at a point beyond. Her face is gaunt and lined, reflecting the hardship she faces, but her right arm and hand symbolize her inner strength. Roy E. Stryker, who offered Lange a job with the Resettlement Administration in August 1935, said of this photograph: "When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it. To me it was the picture of Farm Security. She has all the suffering of mankind in her, but all the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage." As a social-documentary photographer Dorothea Lange used her art to help change the social conditions that existed during the Great Depression. "Migrant Mother" was reproduced repeatedly and became the visual icon of the Depression. This 24 x 32 inch fine-art print of Dorothea Lange's famous photograph would be a compelling addition to any history classroom studying that cataclysmic period.

The woman behind the icon was named Florence Thompson who had left Oklahoma in the early 1930s and was traveling from one California farming town to another in their Model T Ford living in a tent. After her husband Cleo died, Thompson took her family to Nipomo, where a late frost had destroyed the pea crop and they also had major car trouble. While her two boys were in town trying to fix the car, Florence, pregnant with her sixth child, was waiting with three of her daughters (Katharine on the left, Ruby on the right, and the baby is Norma) when Lange took what is probably the most reproduced American photograph of the 20th century after that of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima.

In 1979 Bill Ganzel tracked down Florence as part of a book project he was doing and photographed her and the same three daughters from the original photograph after interviewing them and taking a photograph of them. Florence Thompson died in 1983, angry at the idea that Lange had made a fortune off of her face because of the famous photograph. Of course, because the photograph was shot for the FSA Lange did not make any money (at least, not directly) for the image that was published countless times. But Thompson recognized that the photograph was important because it represented what it was like doing that period, saying: "We just existed! Anyway, we lived. We survived, let's put it that way."