Destitute Pea Pickers, California

Florence Leona Christie was born in 1903 to Cherokee parents living in Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma). At seventeen she married Cleo Owens, the son of a farmer from Missouri. In 1926 the couple and members of her husband's family moved west, settling in Oroville, California. By 1931, when Cleo died of tuberculosis, Florence Owens had had five children and was pregnant with a sixth. She worked at farm labor and in restaurants to support her large family. After an unhappy relationship and another pregnancy, she went back to Oklahoma briefly in 1933, returning to Shafter, California, where she met Jim Hill, a man from Los Angeles who would be her companion until the 1950s. Owens gave birth to an eighth child in 1935 and continued to be the major breadwinner. The family had been in the Imperial Valley picking beets and were on their way toward Watsonville to work in the lettuce fields when car trouble forced them to stop at the Nipomo pea picker's camp. This is where Dorothea Lange found Owens.

The photographer made six four-by-five inch negatives of Owens: two with four of her children, one with just the baby, two with the baby and one toddler, and then one with three of the children in the picture that became the best known, Migrant Mother (98.XM.162). Lange used her Graflex in a horizontal, or "landscape," orientation for four of the images, then rotated the back of the camera and also made two vertical, or "portrait," compositions. This print is from the fourth of her six negatives. It is the photograph the New York Times chose to publish in the "Rotogravure Picture Section" on Sunday, July 5, 1936, cropping it substantially on either side. The section was headlined "Dust, Drought and Erosion Sweep Fifty Million Mid-West Acres, While the Government Fights to Lift the Pall of Misery and Desolation," and the caption for this picture reads (erroneously) "Gazing into the Future and Seeing Dust. A refugee family, from the drought area, camped near San José, Calif. For the duration of the pea harvest. Then, with the price of a tankful [sic] of gasoline, they will strike their tent and wander on."

Long after World War II, Owens met and married George Thompson, a hospital administrator. Florence Owens Thompson died in Scotts Valley, California in 1983.

Adapted from Judith Keller, Dorothea Lange, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 30. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.