Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother) (March 1936) by Dorothea LangeThe J. Paul Getty Museum
In 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange was on a documentary assignment for the US Resettlement Administration. It was now seven years since the Wall Street Crash and well into the Dust Bowl years. Impoverished farm workers had abandoned their homes and were desperate for work.
Lange later recalled that she was driving home after a cold, miserable day's work when she passed a sign for a worker's camp on a pea farm. She followed the sign and came across a shanty town of tents and vehicles. Among these was a desperate woman and her children.
According to Lange, she approached the woman - as if drawn by a magnet - and snapped five pictures. Lange didn't ask her name, but did hear of how the woman had sold the tires of her car to buy food, and scavenged frozen vegetables from the fields.
Almost overnight, the image became a sensation. It appeared to distil all the abstract worries and troubles of the world down to a single woman trying to care for her children. It gained an almost mythical status, and a name, Migrant Mother, but it was far from the whole truth.
Destitute Pea Pickers, California (March 1936) by Dorothea LangeThe J. Paul Getty Museum
It was decades later that the face was given a name. Florence Thompson was a Cherokee woman born in 1903 in Indian Territory, modern-day Oklahoma. Then the mother of seven children, Thompson and her partner Jim Hill were travelling the roads in search of farm work.
Despite the popularity of Migrant Mother, Thompson was unaware of her fame until 1958, when she saw it reprinted in a magazine. According to Thompson, she wrote to Lange asking her to withdraw the image. Thompson's son Troy later recalled her shame at being the face of poverty.
Thompson was quoted as saying, "I wish she hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did."
While Lange said that she had quickly snapped the pictures, the other photographs in the series (as seen here) reveal how she staged and framed the scene. In some Thompson's teenage daughter is present, in the final image only three of the youngest are seen.
[Copy print of Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California] (negative March 1936; print about 1960) by Dorothea Lange and Arthur RothsteinThe J. Paul Getty Museum
Later reproductions of the image also show how Lange cropped and edited the image to remove 'mistakes'. In this later copy, Thompson's thumb gripping the tent pole has been airbrushed out of the image…
…a ghostly outline is only barely visible.
The obvious differences between Lange and Thompson's recollections, between Lange's notes and her images, and the dispute about royalties reveal some of the problems and difficulties with documentary photography.
Lange's notes did contain basic errors, and over the years, as the image was republished, it accumulated more. As the documentary project was paid for by public funds, neither Lange nor Thompson had any rights to image royalties or editorial control.
Much of the dispute took place decades after the event; were Lange or Thompson recalling the events perfectly? And is it correct to edit the image after publication? If images are edited, are they truthful, or are they artistic interpretations?
Thompson died of cancer in 1983. Her son Troy claimed that shortly before her death, she had a change of heart regarding the photograph after receiving thousands of letters of condolence, and tens of thousands of dollars of donations.
Lange also felt the weight of this image. It certainly brought her fame, and some see it as representing the beginning of a more confident style, but it also brought decades of dispute and - supposedly - a degree of guilt that she had instrumentalised a fellow human.
Disputes over the ethics of documentary photography, the rights of subjects and of photographers, and the degree of truth their work represents will continue as long as events are photographed. But perhaps the story of Migrant Mother offers something we can all learn from.
