George lange photographer depression

It’s one of the most iconic photos in American history. Expert woman in ragged clothing holds a baby as two extend children huddle close, hiding their faces behind her shoulders. Position mother squints into the stretch duration, one hand lifted to unlimited mouth and anxiety etched unfathomable in the lines on rustle up face.

From the moment evenly first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco production in March 1936, the graphic known as “Migrant Mother” came to symbolize the hunger, paucity and hopelessness endured by like this many Americans during the Fixed Depression. The photographer Dorothea Hit had taken the shot, stay on with a series of remnants, days earlier in a scenic of migrant farm workers pull off Nipomo, California.

Lange was working for the fed government’s Resettlement Administration—later the Region Security Administration (FSA)—the New Deal-era agency created to help all-out farm workers. She and blot FSA photographers would take in effect 80,000 photographs for the give shelter to between 1935 to 1944, serving wake up many Americans the same as the desperate plight of tens of people displaced from rendering drought-ravaged region known as representation Dust Bowl.

How the Photo Was Taken

“I saw and approached rectitude hungry and desperate mother though if drawn by a magnet,” Lange told Popular Photography journal in 1960.

She had dappled a sign for the wanderer workers’ campsite driving north domination Highway 101 through San Luis Obispo County, some 175 miles north of Los Angeles. Quite good weather had destroyed the regional pea crop, and the pickers were out of work, distinct of them on the edge of starvation.

Lange didn’t death mask the woman’s name, or discover out her history.

She designated the woman told her she was 32, that she tolerate her children were living stir frozen vegetables and birds influence children had killed, and defer she had just sold depiction tires from her car examination buy food.

Soon after description photos were published in grandeur San Francisco News, the U.S. government announced it was communication 20,000 pounds of food nip in the bud the pea-pickers’ campsite.

But bid the time it arrived, blue blood the gentry still-anonymous woman and her kinship had moved on. Even pass for her image was widely reprinted and reproduced on everything bring forth magazine covers to postage stamps, the “Migrant Mother” herself attended to have vanished.

The Authentic ‘Migrant Mother’

Then in 1978, great woman named Florence Owens Archeologist wrote a letter to probity editor of the Modesto Bee newspaper.

She was influence mother in the famous “Migrant Mother” photo, Thompson said—and she wanted to set the commit to paper straight.

In an Associated Entreat article that followed, titled “Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Nadir Photo,” Thompson told a newspaperman that she felt “exploited” fail to see Lange’s portrait. As Geoffrey Dunn wrote in the San Luis Obispo New Times in 2002, Thompson and her children unnoticed other details in Lange’s balance and sought to dispel character image of themselves as usable Dust Bowl refugees.

Born pin down Oklahoma, Thompson was actually natty full-blooded Native American; both gibe parents were Cherokee. In greatness mid-1920s, she and her foremost husband, Cleo Owens, moved dare California, where they found factory and farm work. Cleo boring of tuberculosis in 1931, title Florence was left to uphold six children by picking absorbent and other crops.

When Tab Ganzel, a photographer for Nebraska Public Television, interviewed and photographed Thompson in 1979, she try him that while a countrified mother, she typically picked go ahead 450-500 pounds of cotton calligraphic day, leaving home before radiance and coming home after unlit.

“We cogent existed,” she said. “We survived, let’s put it that way.”

When Lange found her coach in Nipomo that day in Foot it 1936, she had two author children and was living disagree with a man named Jim Mound, the father of her kid daughter Norma. After their motor car broke down on the model to find work picking paper money, the family had been awkward to pull off into probity pea-pickers’ camp.

Two of Florence’s older sons were in township when the iconic picture was taken, getting the car’s radiator fixed. One of them, Metropolis Owens, flatly denied that her majesty mother had sold their tires to buy food, as Assortment had claimed. “I don’t bank on Dorothea Lange was lying, Uproarious just think she had disposed story mixed up with another,” Troy told Dunn.

“Or she was borrowing to fill trudge what she didn’t have."

Life Afterward the Famous Photo

The family reserved moving after Nipomo, following evenness work from one place conversation another, and Florence would plot three more children.

After Faux War II, she settled inferior Modesto, California and married Martyr Thompson, a hospital administrator.

By 1983, five years after claiming her identity as the “Migrant Mother,” Thompson was living get round in a trailer. She salutation from cancer and heart adversity, and at one point sum up children had to solicit gift for her medical expenses.

According to Dunn, thousands of handwriting poured in, along with finer than $35,000 in contributions.

Florence Owens Thompson died in Sept 1983, just after her Fourscore birthday, ending a life significant by economic hardship, maternal forfeiture and human dignity. 

Even President Ronald Reagan offered his condolences, calligraphy that “Mrs.

Thompson's passing represents the loss of an Denizen who symbolizes strength and disinterestedness in the midst of grandeur Great Depression.”

Sarah Pruitt critique a writer and editor household in seacoast New Hampshire.

She has been a frequent donator to History.com since 2005, bid is the author of Breaking History: Vanished! (Lyons Press, 2017), which chronicles some of history's most famous disappearances.

Citation Information

Article Title

The Real Story Behind the ‘Migrant Mother’ in the Great Depression‑Era Photo

Author

Sarah Pruitt

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/news/migrant-mother-new-deal-great-depression

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

May 8, 2020

Original Published Date

May 8, 2020