LANGE, ABOVE, PHOTOGRAPHED MIGRANT
MOTHER, WHICH HAS BECOME THE MOST
ICONIC PICTURE OF THE DEPRESSION
1940 | DOCUMENTING AMERICA
DOROTHEA LANGE
BY ELIZA BERMAN
Dorothea Lange was eager to go home. after a month
in the field in central California in March 1936, the photogra-
pher drove 20 miles past a sign that read Pea-PICKers CamP
before a nagging feeling caused her to turn back. The decision
resulted in a picture of 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson
and three of her children, which came to be known as Migrant
Mother. It remains the most indelible image of the Great De-
pression, and is now one of the most famous photographs ever
made. The photo prompted the government to respond to pre-
vent starvation at the camp, and it was shown at the Museum
of Modern Art’s first photography exhibition, in 1940.
1940, incidentally, was also the year Lange was fired from
her position with the Farm Security Administration for being
“uncooperative.” (For one thing, she refused to follow orders to
train her lens primarily on white Americans, whose suffering,
it was assumed, would engender more support.) She proved
incorrigible: two years later, on assignment for the War Relo-
cation Authority to photograph Japanese- American intern-
ment camps, she made images that were searingly critical of
the policy, which were suppressed until after the war.
Lange was uniquely suited to wield her camera as a tool to
inspire social change by putting a human face on suffering—
work she carried on for three decades following the creation
of her best-known image. Contracting polio as a child had left
her with a limp that helped her relate to outsiders; early work
as a portrait photographer trained her to capture subjects’ dig-
nity. Since her death in 1965, her work has been appreciated
as much for its value as art as for its documentation of history,
though Lange disapproved of her photos’ being divorced from
context, preferring captions that captured her subjects’ voices.
As she put it in an interview not long before her death, “My
powers of observation are fairly good, and I have used them.”MIGRANT MOTHER, 19361940sLANGE, FROM LEFT: RONDAL PARTRIDGE ARCHIVE, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; FAWCETT: FAWCETT FAMILY/ANTHONY CROWLEY/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX; GIES: ALAMY; REIK: HASHOMER HATZAIR ARCHIVES, MORESHET COLLECTION; SCHAFT: NATIONAL H