The Migrant Mother

 

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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.