Explore Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother)

Read About This Photograph by Dorothea Lange

This photograph of an exhausted mother, consumed with worry, is one of six photographs that Dorothea Lange took in a few minutes while at a peapickers’ camp. She had gone to the camp on an impulse after driving 20 miles past it at the end of a long day of work. The woman in the picture, Florence Owens (1903–1983), was the widowed mother of eight children at the time this photograph was taken. She and her family had been picking beets in California’s Imperial Valley as migrant farm workers. They were on their way north to Watsonville to work in the lettuce fields when car trouble forced them to stop at the Nipomo peapickers’ camp. Lange found Owens waiting for her sons to return with the needed car parts.

Regardless of the circumstances, Lange’s photograph of a mother with her three young children conveyed a universal message. Americans were shocked when they saw the photographs published in a San Francisco newspaper, and the federal government immediately sent 20,000 pounds of food to the impoverished farm workers. In the years following, this photograph came to represent the toll of the Great Depression.

Florence Owens eventually had three more children, and her family kept moving, following the California crop harvests. Owens became involved in efforts to organize farm labor and would sometimes serve as the “straw boss,” the one who negotiated wages for migrants as the picking season began. She was still doing field work at the age of 50, before marrying George Thompson and settling into a stable life in Modesto, California.

Questions

Write or discuss your responses.

• Who do you see in this picture? Do you think they are related? Why?
• What do the woman’s expression and pose tell you about how she is feeling?
• Do you think Lange posed the two older children to face away from the camera? If so, why do you think she did that?
• Years later, Florence Owens Thompson did not want this picture published anymore because she felt it labeled her as “poor” when she no longer was. Would you have honored her request? If a subject agrees to be photographed, should they be able to control how the photo is later used?