Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange – A 32-year-old mother of 7 children, Nipomo, California. February 1936.
Dorothea Lange took this photograph in 1936, while employed by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed during the Great Depression to raise awareness of and provide aid to impoverished farmers. In Nipomo, California, Lange came across Florence Owens Thompson and her children in a camp filled with field workers whose livelihoods were devastated by the failure of the pea crops.
Recalling her encounter with Thompson years later, she said: “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”.
Later, Lange would write of the encounter: “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”.
Thompson’s identity was discovered in the late 1970s. Thompson fessed up and shared that she viewed the photo with mixed emotions: on one hand, she was happy it brought attention and support to the area, but on the other, she never profited from the photo. To her, it was more of a reminder of how bad things got and how she resolved to never be that poor again.
