Stories of Iconic Artworks: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother

In 1936, Dorothea Lange captured a photograph that became one of the most famous images of the Great Depression: Migrant Mother. At the time employed by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, which was formed during the Great Depression to raise awareness of impoverished farmers and to provide aid, Lange concentrated on the unemployed and displaced farm workers of the American West and Southwest. The startling image, depicting 32-year-old migrant farm worker Florence Owens Thompson and three of her children, was widely circulated in newspapers and magazines, becoming part of the collective memory of the era. In this edition of our “Iconic Artworks” series, we explore the story behind the iconic photograph.

The Great Depression

The Great Depression started in the United States, after a major fall in stock prices around 4 September 1929. It became worldwide news after the stock market crash of 29 October 1929, which became known as Black Tuesday. Between 1929 and 1932, the GDP fell about 15% worldwide. The Great Depression had devastating effects worldwide, as personal income, tax revenue, profits and pricing dropped and international trade fell by more than 50%. In the United States, unemployment was as high as 23%. On top of that, a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland of the United States, starting in the mid-1930s. Farming communities suffered immensely as crop prices dropped by about 60%.

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to help poor farmers and migrant workers. The FSA resettled farmers on better land and provided emergency relief and money loans, allowing farmers to buy and improve their farms. The FSA also built experimental rural communities, suburban “Greenbelt towns”, and sanitary camps for migrant workers. In order to promote these initiatives, a publicity department was created to document rural poverty and government efforts to alleviate it. The department was named the “Historical Section”. Skilled photographers, some of whom would become the most famous documentary photographers of their time, were hired to travel around the nation capturing images of people in rural areas. Among them was Dorothea Lange.

Dorothea Lange’s Photography

Dorothea Lange became one of the most influential documentary photographers, known especially for her work during the Depression Era and arresting images of migrant workers, homeless and unemployed people affected by poverty. Lange was born in 1898 in Hoboken, New Jersey. She studied photography at Columbia University in New York, and then moved to San Francisco, where she set up a portrait studio. Her early work mostly involved shooting portraits of the San Francisco elite. However, when the Great Depression started, she turned her lens from the studio to the street.

Employed by the FSA, Lange began travelling around the United States, mainly in the American West and Southwest, photographing the destitute people hit hardest by the Great Depression. Here, she truly found her purpose and direction as a photographer. With these new photographs she was taking, Lange became known as one of the first documentary photographers. Notable works of the period include The White Angel Breadline (1933), depicting a man facing away from the crowd in a soup kitchen, and Ditched, Stalled and Stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California (1936), in which we see a man with a haunting, concerned look on his face, sitting in his car. However, Lange’s most famous image is Migrant Mother (1936).