This iconic image comes from the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time when drought and over-farming had turned vast areas of the US Mid-west into a gigantic dust bowl. Tens of thousands of farmers were forced to leave their lands and take up work as migrant labourers. Many of them travelled westwards, seeking work in California.
Florence Owens Thompson, the central figure in this portrait, was born to Cherokee parents in Oklahoma in 1904. In 1935, already a widow with seven children, she abandoned her dust-choked farm and drove west to California in search of work, picking fruit and vegetables for pitifully small wages.
The exact details of how she came to be at a Nipomo farm when this photograph was taken are contradictory, but it appears that she had travelled there to pick a crop of peas. Unfortunately the crop was destroyed by a freak frost the night before the harvest was due to begin so Thompson was stranded with her children, and a broken down car, virtually penniless.
The life of Dorothea Lange, the photographer, makes a stark contrast. She had trained in photography in New York and, having completed her training in her early 20s, she decided to travel around the world with a girlfriend. They got as far as San Francisco where all their money was stolen.
Lange took up work as a photofinisher and, within a year had set up a successful portrait studio in Berkley. When the Great Depression struck she switched to documentary photography, recording the poverty and hardships all around her. It was a marked change from fashionable portraiture.
At the time of this photograph she was working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). She had just completed an assignment photographing migrant workers in Los Angeles and was driving back to Berkley in the rain when she passed a sign reading ‘Pea Pickers Camp’. Apparently she drove on for a further twenty miles before making a U-turn and going back. At the camp she found 2’500 cold and starving migrant workers. In her own words …
“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.”
According to Thompson’s son (one of the children in the image), Lange got some details of this story wrong. “There’s no way we sold our tires,” he said, “because we didn’t have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I 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.”
Lang actually took six pictures with her Graflex 4×5 camera, not five as she states (see the others here). Then she left. “I did not approach the tents and shelters of the other stranded pea-pickers,” she stated. “I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment.”
To me, this raises the question as to how involved a photographer should be with his/her subjects.
Lange did not ask the woman’s name. She remained unknown for more than forty years. It wasn’t until 1978 that Thompson was identified and tracked down in the Californian town of Modesto by a reporter from a local newspaper.
Thompson is 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 sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”
It’s true that Lange didn’t sell the photograph. As she was funded by the federal government at the time, the image was in the public domain and Lange never received any royalties. However, the picture and the attention it received gave a big boost to her career.
And the photograph was published. The San Francisco News ran Lange’s six pictures almost immediately, with an assertion that 2,500 to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in Nipomo. As a result, within days, the pea-picker camp received 20,000 pounds of food from the federal government. However, Thompson and her family had moved on by the time the food arrived.
There is no doubt that this image has extraordinary power showing both the strength and the need of a mother in distress. It is truly one of the world’s great photographs.
But should Lange at least have asked her subject’s name? Sent her a copy of the photograph maybe? Even given her a little bit of money to buy some food.
Or must photographers remain detached from the events they are recording, acting as impartial, uninvolved eyes for the rest of the world? Must they keep those eyes clear and unclouded by tears. Clearly, if you are a photojournalist covering a famine, you can’t feed every one of your subjects.
Reminds me of the story of that one photographer who took a photo of a starving child, then drove off to the airport and later killed himself.
I have a simple solution for myself. I don’t go to such places, couldn’t stand it. So certainly, I wouldn’t try to give advice to others who do. Maybe Lange actually tried to find Ms. Thompson later on to pay her and couldn’t? Maybe she simply forgot to ask the name? It was quite an unusual situation, after all.
Thanks Ralf. It’s a tough call. I don’t think I could do it, either. But if photographers didn’t go to such places we would know much less of them. And, for those who do go, one way of dealing with what they experience is for them to say to themselves, “I’m a photographer. My job is to record what I see in the best way I can, so others can see it too. If I get involved I’m blunting my ‘edge’ as a photographer.”
I don’t know if I agree with that, but it’s a valid point.
ok i have seen these photograph so many times and i have done research papers on Dorothea Lang. as time has passed i have come accross a lot of different theorys about these especific picture, but the one theory that i can never really forget about is the fact that people such as my teacher have said that “migrant mother” was staged by Dorothea Lange herself.
An interesting theory. Thanks. I’m not quite sure what your teacher meant by ‘staged’. Did he/she mean the whole thing was set up? I don’t think there is any doubt that the pea-pickers’ camp that Lang visited was real.
But she may have moved people around. Does that count as ‘staging’? Personally, I don’t think she did move people. If you look at the sequence of images she took you can see that they are natural.
On what grounds did your teacher say this photograph was staged?
I’ve also read a lot about these photos and about Florence Thompson. I’ve read the interview she gave in the local paper where she mentions that they weren’t there picking peas or anything else, they were there because their car broke down and her husband and son went to go get a part they needed to fix it ( I want to say it was some kind of belt for the tires but I don’t remember at this point.) Anyway the upset look in her face and the fact that the children are hiding their faces was because they were put off by this stranger photographing them. Thompson was afraid that if she was portrayed in this light that the government would take her children away. I think it’s a shame that this image has made so much money and the family of Florence Thompson never saw a penny, while the dishonest Lange got a huge career boost out of it.
Thanks for your thought-provoking comment Drena. It highlights one of the problems of documentary photographers. It’s almost exactly the same problem for war photographers, and to a certain extent with street photographers. Their job is to record what they see so that a wider world can see it too. The difficulty is – if they get involved it can hamper their ability to do their job.
A similar case is that of the photographer Frank Hurley, on Shackleton’s doomed Trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914. When the expedition was in desperate trouble and everyone was hauling boats or whatever he was criticised for taking photographs. However, he was working just as hard in just as dangerous conditions (if not more so, as he had to find viewpoints, etc) and his photographs now remain as a testament to the extraordinary courage and fortitude of the men. If he had not recorded the disaster photographically I’m guessing it would be far less known today. His photographs show, graphically, what they went through.
Whatever you think about the morality of Lange’s photograph and her means of getting it, the image remains a haunting and salutary symbol of the great depression.
l just noticed that the children in photo look like they just had a fresh haircut….notice how even their at the near the nape of their is,,,anyone else see that?
Well….
My sympathies are with Mrs. Thompson, the ‘face’ of Depression motherhood.
Having said that, I find this a bit odd:
“Thompson is 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 sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”
When did Mrs. Thompson state that? (the quote I mean)? It must have been years later, i.e. after she had herself seen the photo posted in the media. In other words, the part about not selling the pic, and sending her a copy, is sort of apocryphal….
My point is, it is highly doubtful – to me – that Lange went down that highway past the camp, had a notion and did a u-turn back, took some photos and promised to send a copy to Mrs Thompson (without there even being an address to send it to), and promised not to sell the photo, and then roared back off…I mean, If Lange had seen nothing worth money, why bother taking pics? I dunno. From Mrs. Thompson’s point of view it does look opportunistic.
But it might also be that those two had NO exchange of words… I mean, here’s this Gov’t Gal (semi-educated; liberal, no kids, no worries) come roaring down in a gov’t car…Well, well – authority figure… In those days, who would have called their lawyer?!? Lange would take what pics she wanted, and the devil take the hindmost.
I’m sympathetic to Mrs Thompson, and to me it sounds like opportunism on Lange’s part. But either this photo was staged, with both ladies’ understanding what Lange wanted (now obscured by the years) or it was TOTALLY spontaneous. And in that era, most photos were still staged….
Again, I just dunno. But the story – as told, both sides – ain’t complete:)
– robbie (NC)