ElRo Resources's List: "Migrant Mother"

• The  photograph that has become known  as "Migrant Mother" is  one of a series of photographs that  Dorothea Lange made of Florence  Owens Thompson and her children  in February or March of 1936 in  Nipomo,  California.
• I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother,  as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence  or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions.  I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same  direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her  age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they 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. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children  huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help  her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.  (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

  • She actually made 6.
• I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same  direction.
• The images were made using a Graflex  camera. The original negatives are 4x5" film. It is not possible  to determine on the basis of the negative numbers (which were assigned  later at the Resettlement Administration) the order in which the  photographs were taken.

  • Then how does Don Nardo (How A Photograph Defined The Great Depression: Migrant Mother, p. 34) know the sequence?
• Note: A sixth image that shows the mother and  children in the tent, taken at a medium range and from an angle,  was apparently never received by the Library of Congress. It was  featured in an article by Lange's husband, Paul Taylor, in American  West (May 1970) 7:44. A print of this image may be found in the Dorothea  Lange Archive, Oakland Museum, 1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA,  94607.

  • Remember, the order of these pictures in the LOC catalog isn't the order in which they were originally photographed. How do we know this? Check "What Can Companion Images Tell Us"- 
    http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/photos/question4.html#pres

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• • If the government required the FSA photographers to turn in all their film, how did the 6th image in the series end up in the Oakland Museum.
• Government   regulations required them to turn in all pictures from an assignment.
• The FSA collection therefore offers scholars an unparalleled opportunity   to place masterworks, such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother   (1936), in the context of companion images taken on the same day. (See   activity below.) This visual evidence offers a much more reliable guide   to the photographer’s original intent than the artist’s recollections   recorded decades after the fact.
• • Here are all six of the images in Lange's "Migrant Mother" series.

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• Lange packs up her equipment and jots down a few field notes. She addresses the woman cursorily and learns only that she is 32 years old. Lange never bothers to ask her name nor where she’s from nor how she arrived at this desolate campsite in Nipomo. What she wanted is now safely ensconced on silver nitrate inside her Graflex. "I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers," she remembered. "I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment."

• For all its acclaim, however, Migrant Mother has long remained shrouded in mystery and behind-the-scenes controversy. Perhaps because she felt rushed that mizzly afternoon in Nipomo, Lange was uncharacteristically remiss in ascertaining information about her subject. The little she did record was largely misleading and factually incorrect, including the date of the photos, which her notes alternately report as both February and March of 1936.

   

  Through her negligence, in effect, Lange perpetrated a case of historic deception on the American public.

   

  The person most angry and, indeed, most bitter about Lange’s portrayal was the "migrant mother" herself, Florence Owens Thompson. The Lange photo stamped a permanent Grapes of Wrath stereotype on Thompson’s life–a life that was far more complex and complicated than Lange, or the American public for that matter, might have ever imagined.

  • Do you think Lange "perpetuated" a deception?

• t was in the late 1970s that Thompson’s identity was first made public, when the Associated Press sent a story over the wires entitled, "Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo." Thompson had written a letter to the editor of her local newspaper expressing her disdain for the image.

   

  In the AP story, Thompson declared that she felt "exploited" by Lange’s portrait. "I wish she hadn’t taken my picture," she declared. "I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did."

  • Could Lange have paid Thompson anything?

  • Does Thompson's view of the events surrounding Lange's iconic image of her and her family influence your view of Lange, the photo, or its historic importance? 

• In the field notes that she filed with her Nipomo photographs, Lange included the following description: "Seven hungry children. Father is native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers’ camp … because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food."

   

  Owens scoffed at the description. "There’s no way we sold our tires, because we didn’t have any to sell," he told this writer. "The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn’t have."

  • Do you think Lange made up the story about the family having to sell their tires? If so, why do you think she did it? Does it matter to you? 
• "She also told mother the negatives would never be published–that she was only going to use the photos to help out the people in the camp."

  • Did Lange tell Thompson that the negatives would never be published, or that her name would never be published? 
• Lange, indeed, sent the photos to the Resettlement Administration in Washington, where the photos had an immediate impact on federal bureaucrats, who quickly rushed 20,000 pounds of food supplies to pea-picker camp in Nipomo.
• "Our life was hard long after that photograph was taken," added McIntosh emphatically. "That photo never gave mother or us kids any relief."
• n the spring of 1983, the 79-year-old Thompson, then living by herself in a Modesto trailer purchased for her by her children, was stricken with cancer.

• By mid-summer she needed round-the-clock nursing care that cost more than $1,400 a week. The family couldn’t afford it. Owens decided to issue a plea to the public in the hope of raising enough funds to nurse his mother back to health.

   

  Owens turned to Jack Foley of the San Jose Mercury News, who understood immediately the historic implications of Florence Thompson’s plight.

   

  The story Foley filed for the Mercury generated national attention. More than $35,000 poured into a special Migrant Mother Fund administered by Hospice Caring Project of Santa Cruz County, much of it coming in the form of rumpled dollar bills.

   

  The contributions came in from all over the country. Nacaodoches, Texas. Russellville, Ark. New York City. Los Angeles. But a good many of them came from the farm towns of the San Joaquin Valley that Florence Thompson called home for most her life–Fresno, Wasco, Tulare, Selma, Visalia.

   

  "The famous picture of your mother for years gave me great strength, pride and dignity–only because she exuded those qualities so," wrote a woman from Santa Clara.

   

  "Enclosed is a check for $10 to assist the woman whose face gave and still gives eloquent expression to the need our country still has not met," expressed an anonymous note from New York.

   

  One elderly woman from the Central Valley sent a contribution that most certainly would have struck a chord with Thompson: "I promised the Lord if I won any money in Reno that I would send you some. I wish I could send some more, but this is all I was given."
• "None of us ever really understood how deeply Mama’s photo affected people," said Owens. "I guess we had only looked at it from our perspective. For Mama and us, the photo had always been a bit of curse. After all those letters came in, I think it gave us a sense of pride."

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• Possible #1 in sequence. - ElRo Resources on 2014-01-08

• Then also I was physically disabled, and no one who  hasn't lived the life of a semi-cripple knows how much that  means. I think it perhaps was the most important thing that  happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped  me, and humiliated me. All those things at once. I've never  gotten over it and I am aware of the force and the power of it.
• Years afterwards when I was working, as I work now, with  people who are strangers to me, where I walk into situations  where I am very much an outsider, to be a crippled person, or a  disabled person, gives an immense advantage. People are kinder  to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into     18     Lange: a situation whole and secure ... I can't say it well, but  do you know what I mean? Well this kind of thing, you see,  forms us. We all have those things that form us. They are  of what we are built; they are our architecture. And there's  much we don't know. I mean this is only a part of it. But  the explanation of a person's work sometimes hinges on just  a succession of incidents, and I think it's a very interesting  thing because those incidents dictate our responses.
• You expect a lot of each picture.   Lange: Everything. Everything. Expecially when we used bigger plates,  and every one was deliberate, and then you went to the next one.  Now, with 35 millimeter most people reckon by the yard. "There  surely will be something," you know, "there surely will be  something." But then you stood in a different relationship  to your camera. It was one, two, three. Here's the camera,  and in your hand you had the bulb, and you held your breath  and opened and closed that lens. A time exposure. A very good  way to make a portrait. We'll be coming back to it.     54     Riess: Why?   Lange: Well, because it calls for different and I think more deliberate  responses to the subject. For one thing, no subject can hold  anything that is false for them for long. It can't be done.  You can try, but it's ghastly. So you have to wait until  certain decisions are made by the subject what he's going  to give to the camera, which is a very important decision; and  the photographer what he's going to choose to take. It is a  much longer inner process than putting the camera between  you and the subject and, as I say, reeling them off by the  yard in every imaginable aspect, and all made between the  second, or between the split sections of the seconds.
• But I don't  think that is a necessary approach to good photography, to  heighten and speed up everything, including the taking of the  pictures. Grab shots! The annuals are full of grab shots!
• I think we conjure up and invent people, and then whoever   happens to be there is the recipient of our imagination. A  good deal of the attraction between people, I think, is based  on the fact that one is able to absorb the creation.
• Now in my case the thing is that the business of uniting  the conception of the documentary photograph with the photograph     158     Lange: that also carries within it another thing, a quality that the  artist responds to, is the only way to make a documentary  photograph. You see how difficult this is? A documentary  photograph is not a factual photograph per se. It is a photo-  graph which carries the full meaning and significance of the  episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be  revealed--because you can't really recapture it--by this other  quality. Now there is no real warfare at all between the artist  and the documentary photographer. He has to be both. But he isn't  showingas the artist does who works in abstraction, or who  works rather more divorced from conditions-- just "how he  feels," but it is more that the documentary photographer has to  say "what is it really?" You see that there is a difference.  That is a very, very hard job.

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• "I knew how to keep an
  expression of face that would draw no attention, so no one
  would look at me. I have used that my whole life in photo-
  graphing. I can turn it on and off. If I don't want
  anybody to see me I can make the kind of a face so eyes go
  off me. Do you know what I mean? There's a self-protective
  thing you can do. I learned that as a child in the Bowery." - ElRo Resources on 2014-01-08
• "Then also I was physically disabled, and no one who
  hasn't lived the life of a semi-cripple knows how much that
  means. I think it perhaps was the most important thing that
  happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped
  me, and humiliated me. All those things at once. I've never
  gotten over it and I am aware of the force and the power of it." - ElRo Resources on 2014-01-08
• "ears afterwards when I was working, as I work now, with people who are strangers to me, where I walk into situations where I am very much an outsider, to be a crippled person, or a
  disabled person, gives an immense advantage. People are kinder
  to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure ... I can't say it well, but do you know what I mean? Well this kind of thing, you see, forms us. We all have those things that form us. They are of what we are built; they are our architecture. And there's much we don't know. I mean this is only a part of it. But the explanation of a person's work sometimes hinges on just a succession of incidents, and I think it's a very interesting thing because those incidents dictate our responses." - ElRo Resources on 2014-01-08
• "Now in my case the thing is that the business of uniting the conception of the documentary photograph with the photograph that also carries within it another thing, a quality that the
  artist responds to, is the only way to make a documentary photograph. You see how difficult this is? A documentary
  photograph is not a factual photograph per se. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning and significance of the
  episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed--because you can't really recapture it--by this other quality. Now there is no real warfare at all between the artist
  and the documentary photographer. He has to be both. But he isn't showing as the artist does who works in abstraction, or who works rather more divorced from conditions-- just "how he
  feels," but it is more that the documentary photographer has to
  say 'what is it really?'" - ElRo Resources on 2014-01-08
• Riess: I wanted to ask you about haphazard shooting, and particularly
  in the situation of the FSA team. Why do photographers take
  so many pictures of the samesubject instead of pinpointing what
  it is they want to show and tell in a few shots?
  
  Lange: It's highly desirable to make more than one shot on the same
  subject. There isn't always time. In fact, there is rarely
  time to work deliberately. When you get going, you have to
  shoot fast. Like asking a person to write their letters in
  triplicateyou can't do it, but I certainly wouldn't seriously
  criticize a photographer who works completely without plan,
  and photographs that to which he instinctively responds. In
  fact, that's a pretty good guide--that to which you respond.
  I have all my Asian work that I'm going into now, cutting right
  into the middle of it, and I find that it proves that a very
  good way to workI'm careful not to say "the only way to
  work" because there is none--a very good way to work is open
  yourself as wide as you can, which in itself is a difficult
  thing to do, just to be yourself like a piece of unexposed,
  sensitized material. To know ahead of time what you're looking
  for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions,
  which is very limiting, and often false.
  
  It'u a vi-ry difficult thing to be exposed to the new
  
  
  
  178
  
  
  
  Lange: and strange worlds that you know nothing about, and find your
  way. That's a big job. It's hard, without relying on past
  performances and finding your own little rut, which comforts
  you. It's a hard thing to be lost.
  
  Riess: And so you watch and wait...
  
  Lange: You force yourself to watch and wait. You accept all the
  discomfort and the disharmony. Being out of your depth is
  a very uncomfortable thing. In travel, for instance, you
  force yourself onto strange streets, among strangers. It
  may be very hot. It may be painfully cold. It may be sandy
  and windy and you say, "What am I doing here? What drives
  me to do this hard thing?" You ask yourself that question.
  You could be so comfortable, doing other things, somewhere
  else. You know? - ElRo Resources on 2014-01-08
• "Everything is propaganda for what you
  believe in, actually, isn't it? Yes, it is. I don't see that
  it could be otherwise. The harder and the more deeply you
  believe in anything, the more in a sense you're a propagandist.
  Conviction, propaganda, faith. I don't know, I never have
  been able to come to the conclusion that that's a bad word." - ElRo Resources on 2014-01-08
• "You know what today is? Today is the first day of Autumn. Have you felt it? Today it started. The summer ended this afternoon at two o'clock. All of a sudden. The air got still, a different smell, a kind of a funny, brooding quiet. Today it happened. I was out and I was just so aware of it. Can you feel it? And the cracks in my garden are wide. Today's the day." - ElRo Resources on 2014-01-08

• The successor to the similarly designed Resettlement Administration,   the Farm Security Administration was formed by an act of congress in   1937. One of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's most famous and important New   Deal programs, the FSA strove to help struggling farmers endure the   Great Depression. Through loans and assistance with relocation, the RA   and the FSA aided thousands of farmers devastated by the ebbing demand   for their goods and the dust storms that ravaged the Midwest. Also one   of the New Deal's more controversial programs, the RA needed support to   continue to receive its rather large amount of government funding. In   order to do this the RA, and later the FSA, organized a historical   section to create--and promote--a record of the devastation the   depression had wrought on average Americans and the benefits FSA   projects bestowed on needy farmers.
• Robert J. Doherty remarks that "one of the elements of the   Stryker genius was this ability to get his material to the proper   audience" (qtd. in Anderson 9). Mainly through the new and wildly   popular picture magazines such as Life, Look, and   Fortune, Stryker ensured that nowhere could Americans be   shielded from the images of despair and hope that he circulated across   the nation. In the early years of his reign Stryker enjoyed almost   complete control over which images the public would see, picking the   ones he liked and even going so far as to destroy the ones he thought   failed to represent his ideals (Brannan & Fleischhauer 338-339).
• As T.H. Watkins argues, the photographers themselves were little   removed from the project's intrinsic pressures: "Ostensibly dedicated   to the purest documentary goals, [they] were hardly unaware that their   work was designed both to sell the need for the New Deal's programs and   to celebrate their successes; decisions about what to photograph and to   picture it inescapably were influenced at least subliminally by the   imperative of their mission" (11).

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• Children not familiar with a stranger might show their shyness, but these poses seem maybe a little bit too posed. And posed they are.

  • Where are the author's citations?

  • The author of this piece asserts that the subjects of this photo have been posed by Lange. Has he provided enough evidence to back his assertion up?
• these poses seem maybe a little bit too posed. And posed they are.
• Lange used a 4×5 view camera for these photographs, a camera that usually requires careful preparation of each photograph.

  • Why is this information important to trying to ascertain the truth surrounding Lange's famous series? How many minutes did she say it took her to shoot all the images in the series. How many did she say there were. How many were there actually?
• When I use the term “the photographic facts” I am talking about the information actually contained in a photograph.
• Interestingly, this is the only frame where the subjects are actually engaging with or at least looking at the camera.

  • Do you think this photo was the first, or one of the first that Lange took in this series, or one of the last? Why? What do you think was the original sequence of these pictures. Why do you think so?

• Most of the posing efforts seem to have been spent on the child in the rocking chair, while the group in the background (in the tent) essentially just make sure they occupy the correct spot in the frame.

   

  Note how this image is constructed photographically. The opening of the shelter provides a photographic frame. The subjects are all placed inside that frame, the group in the background very obviously so (they are in fact inside the shelter), whereas the rocking chair (plus an open suitcase) have been placed in front of the opening of the shelter. They might have been there when the photographer arrived, we can’t know for sure.
• I have no way of knowing which frame actually came first; I want to assume Lange started further away and then moved in, but it could have been the other way around. From the photographs, it’s essentially impossible to tell (and it frankly doesn’t matter anyway).

  • Do you think the actual sequence of photos matters or not? Explain.
• Which one of these photographs is the strongest?

  • Which one do you think is the strongest?
• If we ignore the fact that one of these frames has become iconic, the variety of the photographs – the way they are composed, their distance to the subjects, etc. – gives us an opportunity to see how portraiture operates, how adding or withholding information can contribute to the way a portrait is perceived, how adding or withholding information makes us see and then feel different things.
• Portraiture makes the viewer’s task particularly tricky, because it often seduces us to see things that aren’t actually there. A photograph of another person never is that other person. It always “only” is a photograph, made with specific devices and (usually) intent. To understand how portraiture works, one needs to look at the use of the devices, to possibly infer a little about the intent, and to learn a lot about what we bring to the table when looking at a photograph of another person.

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