The subject of the Migrant Mother photograph was Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant agricultural worker and mother whose image was captured by Dorothea Lange in March 1936 at a pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. Born Florence Leona Christie in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), she was a member of the Cherokee Nation who spent much of the Great Depression moving throughout California in search of agricultural work while raising a large family. Although the photograph’s subject remained anonymous for decades, Thompson was identified in 1978 after she publicly told her side of her encounter with Lange, who died in 1965.
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