Face of the Times: Migrant Mother and the Great Depression

Migrant Mother and the Great Depression

You might have seen this photograph before, especially because of its reuse in recent years in propaganda as America struggled with a lesser recession. Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange was taken in 1936, in the heart of the Great Depression, and the story behind it is as intriguing as the photograph itself.

Migrant Mother, Nipomo by Dorothea Lange (America); 1936; silver gelatin print.
Location: Oakland, CA, United States; Museum of California Oakland.

Dorothea Lange was a hired photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Resettlement Administration (RA); her job was to give a face to the consequences of the Great Depression and depict the struggles of normal people.

Lange visited a camp of migrant pea pickers near Nipomo, California, where this photograph was taken. On that day, she took five photographs, including this one of the woman with three of her children in their tent. The image was printed in newspapers nation-wide with the assertion that thousands of agricultural workers in California were starving. As a result, the federal government sent twenty thousand pounds of food to the camp, but by the time it arrived the family shown had moved on to another camp near Watsonville, California.

The woman, Florence Owens Thompson, remained anonymous until the 1970s because Lange merely jotted down "seven hungry children. Father is native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers' camp ... because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food." According to Florence, however, they never sold the tires off their car because they needed them to migrate with the crops; she thought perhaps Lange had parsed together her story with another family's.

This photograph is considered one of the most famous documentary photographs produced in the 1930s. The photograph became a symbol of strength during hard times and literally gave a face (albeit an anonymous one, for a time) to the Great Depression because of the honesty conveyed.

In 1983, the photograph was once again in newspapers because the Migrant Mother herself had cancer and had a stroke, so her children needed donations to deter the costs of their mother's medical expenses because she lacked insurance. Reports of the amount varied but it was between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars received. Florence died a few months later, but her story continues through this single moment caught in time.