migrant mother dorothea lange

Posted by: Rhoda on 4:08 PM in Dorothea Lange

Photography of Florence Owens Thompson, known as "Migrant Mother", Pea-Pickers Camp, Nipomo, California (1936) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A woman who was 4 years old when her photo was snapped as part of a series documenting hardships of the Great Depression talked to CNN today about the photo that became known as "Migrant Mother." The photo, shown alongside this story, was taken in a migrant resettlement camp. Katherine McIntosh, now 76, told CNN that people were starving in that camp and that her mother, a migrant farm worker, was ashamed of their living conditions. But she agreed to have the photo published as long as her family's names weren't used in the hopes that documenting the migrant camp conditions might result in improvements.

Dorothea Lange, the photographer who snapped the Migrant Mother photo, was a prominent documentary photographer who took photos of migrant workers for a Depression-era government agency, the Resettlement Administration. She later photographed compelling yet disturbing conditions in Japanese relocation camps during World War II. Her relocation camp photos depicted conditions with such brutal honesty that they were sometimes censored by the U.S. government.

Interviewed about the Migrant Mother photo in 1960, Lange said the mother, Florence Owens Thompson, told her that the family had been living off frozen vegetables found in the fields and birds killed by her children.

While the Migrant Mother photo became an icon of Depression poverty, the shooting of the photo almost didn't happen. Lange had finished her month-long government photography assignment and was traveling home when she saw a crude sign at the side of the road with the words "pea picker's camp." Lange continued on past the sign, struggled with her failure to inquire about conditions at the pea pickers camp for the next 20 miles, and made a U-turn. When she arrived at the pea pickers camp, she spied Thompson sitting outside a lean-to and sought permission to photograph her and her family.

Thompson herself was in the migrant camp that day as a result of happenstance. She had been driving down highway 101 and driving through the pea picker's camp when the timing chain on her car broke, prompting her to set up camp there.
Carol Bengle Gilbert

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