Migrant Mother (1936)

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Migrant Mother (1936) is one of Dorothea Lange’s most recognised and famous piece of artworks. Due to this photo, photographed by Dorothea Lange, it won her the Guggenheim Fellowship Award. This photo depicts Florence Thompson and her two cowering children, at a campsite full of out-of-work pea pickers. 

 

To photograph this shot, Lange had one day found herself in Nipomo, in a campsite on a freezing and rainy day. As it was a campsite for seasonal agricultural workers, the freezing rain discouraged them from harvesting anything as all the crops had been destroyed. Dorothea Lange had approached one of the idle workers, a woman sitting in a tent, surrounded by her seven children, and asked if she could photograph them. Lange had taken five exposures and six pictures of Florence Thompson in the timespan of ten minutes at the campsite. Dorothea Lange had used a 4×5 view camera, which usually requires additional care and preparation, to photograph the six photos that day. Although the camera requires more preparation for each photograph, the framework of the photo and position of the subjects is the extent of Lange’s control of the elements of the photographs in that specific moment.

 

The photo was taken in Nipomo California in 1936, in the era of the Great Depression. The shot depicts a woman, her two children cowering away from the camera, and an infant in the woman’s lap. This photo captures the facial expression of the mother, as she gazes distractedly into the distance. All three subjects are clothed in torn and threadbare attire, with their hair dishevelled, as well as the infant in a decrepit blanket. The woman, Florence Thompson was a mother of seven children, all on the brink of starvation. The indescribably poignant expression on Thompson's face stands out from between the bowed heads of her sons, whose presence reveals the nature of her concerns. 

 

Lange states, “I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that [she and her children] had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.” The quote portrays Lange’s style and technique of photographing a specific subject, which is the detachment and neutrality of her and the subject.  The understanding and intimacy between Lange and the subject is scarce, but Lange is still capable of capturing the moment with such precision. 

 

Dorothea Lange had not told the woman what facial expression to portray. “I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her but I do remember she asked me no questions,” Lange describing her experience in an interview with the magazine ‘Popular Photography’.  It is the unspoken relationship between the subject and the photographer that makes ‘Migrant Mother’ such a powerful one.

 

During the time of the Great Depression, the interior of the United States had a vast majority of families that were exactly like hers, whom poverty had forced off their land and into a life of wandering. Like in many of Lange’s photographs, Lange wanted to exhibit the poverty, which was the main issue during 1930s, denoting that there is no subjective or objective viewpoint of the photographer’s perspective. Although there is a sense of plight attached to each image, there is no bias as Lange’s intention was to document the Depression.

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