Colorized

Lange Turned Documentary Photography Into Iconic Art

For those who never experienced the Great Depression it can feel like a fairy tale told to remind us to appreciate the things we have. Thanks to photographer Dorothea Lange we have the ability to see exactly what it was like to live through the Depression, and the ways in which it really ground down the American people.

Lange's photos don't just show the dire straits that the people most heavily affected by the Depression were in; her photos show the despair and pain that came with trying to feed a family with nothing, and begging for scraps from people who were in the same economic free fall.

One of Lange's most well-known photos shows a woman in her 30s, Florence Owens Thompson, and her seven children as she attempted to navigate her large family through one of the lowest moments in American history.

source: marina maral

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, Dorothea Lange can of age on the Lower East Side in Manhattan where she contacted polio at the age of seven. Left with a permanent limp, Lange decided that she would be a photographer even though she'd yet to come in contact with a camera. After studying photography at Columbia University she moved to San Francisco where she opened a small photo studio where she took portraits for members of the west coast's social elite.

When the Great Depression hit, Lange took her camera into the fields and streets. She snapped shots of the homeless and people waiting in bread lines before she was hired by the federal Resettlement Administration (later known as the Farm Security Administration) where she documented poverty across California and the midwest, specifically photographing sharecroppers and migrant workers to show the ways in which they were exploited.

Florence Owen Thompson was a pea picker with nothing to pick

source: library of congress

While traveling through Nipomo, California, in 1936 Lange entered a camp set up for a group of out of work pea pickers. A recent freeze destroyed the crop, leaving the workers with nothing to do. Florence Owen Thompson was one of those workers. When Lange approached Thompson she learned that the woman had recently sold the tires on her car for enough money to buy food, but after that she was unsure about her options. Lange explained:

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.

Lange took five photos of Thompson with her Graflex camera, beginning far away to show the entire site before moving closer and closer until she captured and image of Thompson known as "Migrant Mother" that showcased the pain of the Depression.

No one knew who Thompson was until the 1970s

source: Modesto Bee

Lange's image of Thompson showed the pain and frustration of the Great Depression. The image doesn't just show the viewer what it was like to live through this harrowing time, it makes you feel the pain of the itinerant workers. However, no one knew who the woman was at the center of "Migrant Mother" until the 1970s.

In 1978, a reporter from the Modesto Bee tracked Thompson down to a trailer park outside of Modesto, California. At 75 years old, Thompson told the reporter that she asked Lange not to publish her name out of fear that it would come back to embarrass her children. Born in Oklahoma in 1903, Thomson nee Christie moved to California after marrying when she was 17. Her husband died when she was 28 years old, leaving her with six children to feed on one income. Throughout the 1930s she worked picking crops from season to season, often sleeping in under the stars on "a ratty old quilt."

Thompson never made any money off of "Migrant Worker." Even when she was being interviewed she admitted that she worked six hours a day to barely squeak by. She eventually expanded her family to 10 children, and refused to use her status as the model at the heart of Lange's photo to gain recognition. After she suffered a stroke in 1983 her children used the Migrant Mother angle to raise $15,000 to pay their mother's medical bills. She died shortly afterwards.

Lange won a Guggenheim for her work

source: new york public library

In 1941, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work, but she gave it up to photograph Japanese Americans after they were forcefully displaced following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lange passed away of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco. Throughout her life she documented the pain and anxiety of the lower class and the displaced. She made the world look at what no one wanted to see, and through her art is still technically doing it today. "Migrant Mother" became the most reproduced photo in the world. It brought the plight of migrant workers to the front pages of every newspaper, and it made Lange a star in the world of photography.

A 32-Year-Old Mother Of 7 Sells Her Children In California, 1936 'Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange' (Colorized)

Lange Turned Documentary Photography Into Iconic Art

Florence Owen Thompson was a pea picker with nothing to pick

No one knew who Thompson was until the 1970s

Lange won a Guggenheim for her work