Migrant Mother Heng

Artist Biography Dorothea Nutzhorn (Lange) was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 26th May, At the age of seven, Dorothea contracted polio which left her with a permanent limp. After her German born father abandoned the family, Dorothea assumed her mother's maiden name. Lange studied at the New York Training School for Teachers but changed her mind and decided to become a photographer. She worked in a Arnold Genthe's studio before studying photography under Clarence White at Columbia University. In 1918 Lange moved to San Francisco and the following year established her own portrait studio in the city. Lange joined the California Camera Club where she met and influenced by the work of Consuelo Kanaga, a radical photojournalist with the San Francisco Chronicle. Lange's business was very successful until the Economic Depression that began after the Wall Street in followed. She now turned her attention to social realism and her photograph of a group of unemployed males, White Angel Breadline (1932), brought her to the attention of national critics and in 1934 Williard Van Dyke wrote an important article about her work in Camera Craft.

In 1935 Lange was invited by Roy Stryker to join the the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration. This small group of photographers, including Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Mary Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Jack Delano, Charlotte Brooks, John Vachon, Carl Mydans, and Ben Shahn, were employed to publicize the conditions of the rural poor in America. Over the next few years Lange produced several notable photographs such as Migrant Mother (1936). During this period Lange met Paul S. Taylor, a sociologist at the University of California. Taylor invited her to accompany him on his studies of migratory workers. Their book, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, appeared in In 1942 Lange was hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the internment of Japenese-Americans during the Second World War. She was also employed by the Office of War Information ( ). Lange also covered the United Nations Conference in San Francisco for the State Department. After the war Lange did several assignments for Life Magazine including Three Mormon Towns (1954) with Ansel Adams and Death of a Valley (1960). She also made photographic tours of Asia, South America and the Middle East. Dorothea Lange died of cancer on 11th October, 1965, just before the opening of her major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Visual Analysis –The subject of the picture, Florence Owens Thompson, had seven children and that she and her family had to live in tents or cars as they traveled from farm to farm in California picking cotton.

Dorothea Lange American, 1895–1965 Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1936, printed later Photogravure 30.4 x 23 cm Bequest of Michael Cohen,

Historical Context She was driving home after a month in the field when she happened upon a sign identifying the camp. She tried to ignore the sign and drive on, but after twenty miles she was compelled to return to the camp, “following instinct, not reason.” She shot six photographs in a very short period of time of the woman and members of her family, starting at a distance and working her way closer and closer after the fashion of a portrait photographer. Her photos first appeared in the San Francisco News on March 10, 1936, as part of a story demanding relief for the starving pea pickers. The feature was a success: relief was organized, and there is no record of death by starvation.

Significance At its most obvious, “Migrant Mother” communicates the pervasive and paralyzing fear that was widely acknowledged to be a defining characteristic of the depression and experienced by many Americans irrespective of income. Thus, the photograph embodies a limit condition for democracy identified by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” Roosevelt could not embody that emotion without bringing the country down with him, but perhaps this correspondence accounts in part for each being the most memorable text and image from the era. The shift from his oratory to her visual image has other consequences as well. Embodiment provides a dual function emotionally: it both represents and localizes feelings that can literally know no bounds.