- Also called:
- Human Erosion in California
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California
What is the significance of the photograph Migrant Mother?
Who was the Migrant Mother?
What impact did the publication of Migrant Mother have?
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, Dorothea Langeâs 1936 picture of migrant Florence Owens Thompson and her children, is widely regarded as one of the most iconic photographs of the Dust Bowl period of the Great Depression. It owes its existence to Thompsonâs unfortunate car trouble and Langeâs inability to resist a nagging feeling that she should turn her car around. This unlikely combination of bad timing and documentary instinct produced an enduring symbol of resilience in the face of hardship.
Migrant Mother has been held up as a visual representation of the goals of the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), one of the New Deal agencies created to implement U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Rooseveltâs agricultural relief policies. Of the 270,000 pictures taken by staff photographers between 1935 and 1943, project leader Roy Stryker singled out Migrant Mother: âWhen Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. To me, it was the picture of Farm Security. The others were marvelous but that was special.â Migrant Mother is one of the most-published photographs in American history.
The federal response to agricultural collapse during the Great Depression
During the 1930s, especially between 1934 and 1935, 27 U.S. statesâequaling 75 percent of the countryâs landsâwere affected by catastrophic droughts (see the Dust Bowl) that exacerbated the hardships of the Great Depression. By 1940 an estimated 2.5 million people had migrated out of the Plains states, more than 200,000 of whom moved to California in search of employment in the stateâs agricultural sector. To assist struggling Americans, the federal government created new relief programs that provided financial assistance, employment, and conservation and agricultural reforms. The result was a significant expansion of federal power.
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âWe introduced Americans to America.â
âRoy Stryker, introduction to In This Proud Land: America, 1935â1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (1973)
The Resettlement Administration was established by executive order on April 30, 1935, to approve resettlement projects for destitute and low-income families, administer approved conservation projects, and provide loans to farmers to purchase land and equipment. The Historical Section of the RA (later called the Farm Security Administration [FSA]), led by Stryker, had a dual mission: create a broad photographic record of the experiences of rural Americans during the Great Depression and distribute those photographs to government agencies, congressional committees, and news organizations as evidence to support federal agriculture relief policies. Stryker explained that the photographers âhelped make the public aware of national problems and justified to people in cities a program that was largely rural.â
To achieve the RAâs aims, Stryker hired artists whose names are now listed among the leading documentary photographers of this period: Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, and Dorothea Lange. The photographs contained in the Farm Security Administration collection, held at the Library of Congress, depict scarcity, despair, desolation, and suffering but also hope, resilience, and, later, progress in response to government intervention.
Primarily a portrait photographer, Lange began photographing unemployed men wandering the streets of San Francisco during the early years of the Great Depression, starkly capturing their desperation. Her photographs received immediate recognition from the public and the attention of the RA. With her photographs of San Francisco breadlines, Lange was already doing the work of an RA photographer: using photography to document poverty and injustice. She joined Strykerâs staff in 1935.
The creation of Migrant Mother
Dorothea Langeâs recollection
In March 1936 Lange had just completed a monthlong assignment and was hurrying home to San Francisco when she passed a sign that read âPea Pickers Camp.â She drove on for 20 miles (32 km) before giving in to a nagging feeling that she should turn back and investigate.
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Lange wrote no contemporary field notes for her encounter with Florence Owens Thompson, the woman who would become known as Migrant Mother. What we know about Thompson and Langeâs experience making the photograph comes from caption cards for the negatives she provided to the RA and later interviews. Her most widely quoted remembrance appeared in the article âThe Assignment Iâll Never Forget: Migrant Mother,â published in the February 1960 issue of Popular Photography. Lange recounted:
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 thirty-two. 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. 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.
Although her image would become an archetype of maternal worry and suffering, Thompson was not referenced by name in Langeâs reminiscences because the photographer never knew her identity. But that was not because Lange had forgotten to ask: RA photographers were instructed by Stryker to use social-science techniques in which subjects remained anonymous and therefore could stand in for the everyday men and women who needed government assistance. It was not until 1978 (Lange died in 1965) that Thompson was identified after she wrote a letter to the editor of The Modesto Bee complaining about the picture. A resulting story, first published on October 23 in an article entitled âââMigrant Motherâ Tells Story Behind Famed Photo,â was picked up by the Associated Press, sending Thompsonâs side of the story nationwide.
Florence Owens Thompson and familyâs recollection
A member of the Cherokee Nation, Florence Leona Christie was born on September 1, 1903, and raised in Indian Territory outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma. In 1921 she married Cleo Owens, and later that decade they migrated to California in search of agricultural work. Cleo Owens died in 1931, leaving Florence Owens to raise their six children. Another son was born in 1933.
In 1934 Owens, her children, and other relatives migrated to the southern San Joaquin Valley, looking for work. There, Owens met Jim Hill, who was from Los Angeles. The two formed a family and had three children, one of whom died young. The family migrated throughout central and northern California in search of agricultural work and did not experience economic stability until after World War II when Owens met and married George Thompson. The Thompsons had a daughter.
Although Lange captured Florence Owens Thompson on one of her hardest days, one of Thompsonâs daughters described her mother as someone who loved her family and found joy even among the deprivations of the Great Depression. Thompson died in Scotts Valley, California, on September 16, 1983. The epitaph on her gravestone reads âMigrant Mother: A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood.â
When newspapers and magazines published Langeâs pictures of the Thompson family, the distributing photo agency supplied captions that focused broadly on the residents of the pea pickersâ camp instead of the familyâs specific circumstances. Additionally, some of the information that Lange noted on caption cards for the RA or remembered decades later was incorrect.
Thompson, partner Jim Hill, and their children were driving from Los Angeles to Watsonville, California, in search of work when their car broke down. It was towed off the highway into the pea pickersâ camp, where Lange ultimately found them. Exhausted from trying to help fix the car, Thompson was resting in a makeshift tent with four of her daughters when Lange approached. Thompson recounted in 1978, âShe didnât ask my name. She said she wouldnât sell the pictures. She said sheâd send me a copy. She never did.â She continued that although she was proud of the photograph, âI didnât get anything out of it. I wish she hadnât [have] taken my picture.â (As a federal employee, Lange did not own the copyright to her photographs and could not sell them.)
In 2002 Thompsonâs children expounded on the story and took issue with a number of Langeâs recollections, particularly that the family had sold their tires for food. As one son noted, there was no way that the family sold their tires because they were on the car when the family drove out of the camp. By the time the photograph was published, the family had reached Watsonville. It was while they were there that son Troy Owens saw the published photograph and brought it back to the family. He recounted, âWe showed her the picture, and she just looked at it. She didnât say nothinâ.â
Thompsonâs children did not believe that Lange was lying or making up anything in recounting her time with Thompson but that she had likely gotten the family mixed up with others she had photographed in similarly dire circumstances.
Publication and reception of Migrant Mother
The first publication of Migrant Mother occurred on March 11, 1936, in an editorial in The San Francisco News on what was the third day of coverage about the pea pickersâ plight (two other Lange photographs were published on March 10). The photograph ran large under the headline âWhat Does the âNew Dealâ Mean to This Mother and Her Children?â The accompanying text read:
This remarkable photograph epitomizes the human side of one of Californiaâs oldest and gravest problemsâthe plight of nearly 200,000 men, women and children who move from valley to valley with the crops and live in wretched improvised shelters as they perform the labor on which our harvests depend.
Here, in the fine strong face of this mother, photographed at the camp of starving pea-pickers in San Luis Obispo County, is the tragedy of lives lived in squalor and fear, on terms that mock the American dream of security and independence and opportunity in which every child has been taught to believe.
The shame is that California is not only not tackling this problem but that through its wealthiest and most responsible citizens it is deliberately seeking to block the one constructive step that has been proposed to make life a little more secure and a little more decent for these people. We refer to the desire of the Federal Resettlement Administration to build 20 sanitary camps for migratory workers, and to the organized opposition of the agricultural section of the State Chamber of Commerce to the carrying out of that program.
The conscience of California should find its voice in a demand that the Federal Government be encouraged to go ahead with its plans for these sorely needed camps.
Langeâs photograph had fulfilled the mission of Stryker and the RA: provide images of real American need that would spur public support for government assistance. Federal authorities soon sent 20,000 pounds (9,072 kg) of food to the pea pickersâ camp.
Between 1936 and 1940 the photograph was published in more than a dozen newspapers and magazines, as varied as The Washington Post, U.S. News, and the Pilgrim Highroad, a monthly publication for Christian youth.
The Migrant Mother series
In total, Lange took seven photographsâusing a Graflex camera loaded with four-by-five-inch negative filmâof Thompson and her children. In âThe Assignment Iâll Never Forget,â Lange incorrectly stated, nearly 24 years after the brief photo shoot, that she took five exposures. Although five shots are included in the FSA collections at the Library of Congress, two additional exposures are held in the Dorothea Lange Collection at the Oakland Museum of California. The museum has the first in the seriesâwhich was taken off to the side as Lange approached the groupâand a shot that was discovered in the early 2000s on a contact sheet for a batch of lost negatives. The latter is the fourth image in the slideshow below.
Lange left no shot list, but the slideshow that follows presents the photographs in a probable order in which they were taken. One thing that is known: Migrant Mother was the last of the seven shots that Lange took on that cold rainy day in early March 1936.