Text of the video:
Photographer Dorothea
Lange was hired by the Federal Government to document and publicize the plight
of the rural poor.
On assignment in
California, Lange passed a roadside camp of more than a thousand homeless men,
women, and children.
She stopped to take a
photograph that would become one of the best-known images of the Depression
era.
“I didn’t want to stop.
Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty
highway.”
“I saw and approached
the hungry and desperate mother.”
“She said that they had
been living on 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
picture might help her, so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about
it.”
“My mother was a strong
lady, very proud lady. She believed in, uh, ‘you work for what you get, you’re
not gonna get something for nothing.’ And always be honest, and, uh, she loved
us children very much. I always considered my mother very, very strong.”
“Looking at her in the
picture she doesn’t look like a beautiful woman, but she really was. She was a
very strong lady. And we, we really relied on that.”
Within days of Lange’s
visit, published photos of the 32 year old widow Florence Thompson, triggered
immediate Federal food aid to the hungry migrants, and called national
attention to conditions in California’s agricultural valleys.
