A print is housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Migrant Mother depicts a mother looking off into the distance with two of her children at her sides and an infant in her lap. Her children's faces are not shown as the children both bury their faces in their mother's shoulders.
Where did the photo of the Migrant Mother come from?
Migrant Mother is a photograph taken in 1936 in Nipomo, California by American photographer Dorothea Lange during her spell at the Farm Security Administration. Since then, the photograph has become an icon of the Great Depression and because it is in the public domain, it has been reproduced to serve as advertisements and much more.
Where did Dorothea Lange take the picture of Migrant Mother?
Nipomo, California. 1936. U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Prints & Photographs Division. 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 March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.
How old is the woman in the Migrant Mother?
Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California. 1936. U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Prints & Photographs Division. 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 March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.
Where is the Migrant Mother now?
Florence died of "stroke, cancer and heart problems" at Scotts Valley, California, on September 16, 1983 at age 80. She was buried in Lakewood Memorial Park, in Hughson, California, and her gravestone reads: "FLORENCE LEONA THOMPSON Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood."
What was the purpose of the Migrant Mother photo?
Dorothea Lange took this photograph in 1936, while employed by the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed during the Great Depression to raise awareness of and provide aid to impoverished farmers.
Who took the photo Migrant Mother MOMA and why is it significant?
Meet the master artist through one of her most important works. Photographer Dorothea Lange, whose picture Migrant Mother is one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century, believed it was important to lead a “visual life.”
Why is the Migrant Mother in the public domain?
Who Was Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother? In an earlier post I noted that one of the most famous American photographs of the twentieth century is in the public domain in the United States since it was taken by Dorothea Lange when she was employed by the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression.
Who is depicted in Migrant Mother?
Florence ThompsonSeveral decades after the photograph's publication, a journalist found the identity of the iconic photograph's mother – Florence Thompson – discovering that she was born in 1903 in a Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. She married at the age of seventeen and had six children until her husband died in 1931.
Who took the Migrant Mother picture?
Dorothea Lange'sDorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" Photographs in the Farm Security Administration Collection. Discover more about an iconic image from the Farm Security Administration Collection.
Was the Migrant Mother photo staged?
Along with staging the scene, it turns out that there was very little spontaneity in Lange's image that soon became iconic. But does it diminish the power of this image? According to the Nerdwriter, being able to see the steps of Lange's process even enhances her work.
What is Dorothea Lange's most famous picture?
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CaliforniaDorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography. Her most famous portrait is Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936).
Who took the famous Great Depression photo?
Dorothea Lange Her “Migrant Mother” photographs shot in Nipomo, California, are perhaps the best-known photographs of the Great Depression.
How did Migrant Mother change the world?
Migrant Mother went on to become the public face of the Dust Bowl migrants; help win Lange a Guggenheim fellowship in 1941; adorn U.S. postage stamps; and inspire John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Is the migrant mother art or documentation?
Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother is widely recognized as the most popular social documentary photograph of all time. During the course of her 40-year career, Lange's style as a photographer proposed that social documentary photography is a humanist art form.
What is the subject matter of Migrant Mother?
Subject Matter Migrant Mother depicts the female farm worker with 2 young children at her side and a sleeping baby on her lap. As she sits with her children, she stares into the distance and gently holds her hand to her face, suggesting that she is deep in thought.
Where was the Migrant Mother photograph taken?
Nipomo, California. 1936. U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Prints & Photographs Division. 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 March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.
Is there a restriction on Lange's "Migrant Mother"?
There are no known restrictions on the use of Lange's "Migrant Mother" images. Follow the link to read the collection rights statement.
Where did the Migrant Mother live?
After World War II, she settled in Modesto, California and married George Thompson, a hospital administrator. By 1983, five years after claiming her identity as the “Migrant Mother,” Thompson was living alone in a trailer.
What does the mother's face represent?
From the moment it first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco newspaper in March 1936, the image known as “Migrant Mother” came to symbolize the hunger, poverty and hopelessness endured by so many Americans during ...
Where did Lange see the hungry mother?
She had spotted a sign for the migrant workers’ campsite driving north on Highway 101 through San Luis Obispo County, some 175 miles north of Los Angeles. Bad weather had destroyed the local pea crop, and the pickers were out of work, many of them on the brink of starvation.
What was the purpose of Lange's photographs?
She and other FSA photographers would take nearly 80,000 photographs for the organization between 1935 to 1944, helping wake up many Americans to the desperate plight of thousands of people displaced from the drought-ravaged region known as the Dust Bowl.
Who was Dorothea Lange's mother?
Dorothea Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" photograph. Then in 1978, a woman named Florence Owens Thompson wrote a letter to the editor of the Modesto Bee newspaper. She was the mother in the famous “Migrant Mother” photo, Thompson said—and she wanted to set the record straight. In an Associated Press article that followed, ...
Did the Migrant Mother disappear?
But by the time it arrived, the still-anonymous woman and her family had moved on. Even as her image was widely reprinted and reproduced on everything from magazine covers to postage stamps, the “Migrant Mother” herself appeared to have vanished.
Who captured the Migrant Mother?
Well, how about one that's worth 169,000 words and 20,000 pounds of food? Of all of the photographs that came out of the Great Depression, few have had as an immediate or timeless impact as the one colloquially called Migrant Mother, captured by documentary photographer Dorothea Lange in 1936.
Why did the government send 20,000 pounds of food to a migrant camp?
The image of a worried but resilient mother was so powerful that it prompted the government to send 20,000 pounds of food to relieve starvation in a migrant worker camp. It may have also helped inspire John Steinbeck's literary classic The Grapes of Wrath. That's a picture that's certainly worth another thousand words.
What was the significance of the photograph of the relief effort?
The photograph did what it was meant to: it inspired the relief effort. It's an important picture that documented one of America's toughest times and that's inspired thousands of words worth of analysis; words that certainly won't be the last.
Why do children bury their faces?
At the same time, the children bury their faces, looking away from you, which was done partly to avoid distracting you from the emotional face of the mother. However, it also dehumanizes the children to a degree, emphasizing their desperation, hopelessness, and precarious condition.
Why did Florence Owens Thompson capture the national attention?
It immediately captured the national attention due to its level of human emotion and objective detachment that let people feel as if they were looking into her life.
Does the mother make eye contact with the viewer?
The mother herself also avoids eye contact with the viewer. Rather than meet your gaze, she looks off into the distance, and doesn't acknowledge the camera. This isn't a conversation between subject and audience. It's a glimpse into her life, and we are the fly on the wall, observing as she contemplates her situation. Is she worrying about the future? Is she thinking about her children? We, the viewers, are left to imagine her thoughts, thereby placing ourselves in her shoes.
Who is the person who looks at the American country woman?
Rexford Guy Tugwell, quoted in Dorothea Lange , Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1967), 6. An image, especially a positive print, recorded by exposing a photosensitive surface to light, especially in a camera.
Why did Dorothea Lange take this photograph?
government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed during the Great Depression to raise awareness of and provide aid to impoverished farmers.
What is an emblem?
A form, sign, or emblem that represents something else, often something immaterial, such as an idea or emotion.
Where did the Okies migrate?
Huge waves of migrants, derogatorily described as Okies traveled by car and by trains to areas that promised work and fertile land, especially California’s central and coastal valleys where agricultural work was available year-round.
Where did Lange stop her car?
Stopping her car, at a pea picker’s camp outside of Nipomo, a small farming community on California’s Central Coast, following a month-long photographic expedition documenting migrant camps, Lange remembered spending only 10 minutes the ramshackle camp and took only 5 exposures. [9] .
What is the status of a photograph?
The status of the photograph as evidence and official record grew out of complex social negotiations involving its use in legal practice, the sciences, and the expanding role of the photograph in the arts and art history.
Why did magazines include photos?
Magazines were just beginning to include photographs, and image saturation was not yet a factor . Social reform movements and later, governments effectively used photography to serve social reform and political ends, a trend that expanded greatly during the political upheavals of the First World War.
Where were FSA photographs published?
FSA photographs were included in exhibits, published in books and widely seen in large glossy magazines of the era including Life, Look, US Camera , and numerous regional and national newspapers. Walker Evans, Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama, 1936.
Who were the photographers that were part of the FSA?
The FSA not only provided documentation of the government’s efforts to provide relief and resources, but it also provided work for a substantial number of photographers, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, John Vachon, and Carl Mydans.
Was Lange's mother identified in the original publication?
Within days, food was rushed to the farm colony. Lange was not mentioned nor was the mother identified in the original publication. Migrant Mother became an instant classic, widely exhibited in museums, first at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, and included in countless books and publications.
How to reproduce an image from MoMA?
If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).
What is MoMA's collaboration with Google?
In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.
What is Lange's mother's name?
For many, Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California is the single most recognizable image from the Great Depression, epitomizing the desperate circumstances many found themselves in during that period. The now-iconic photograph was made for the US government’s Resettlement Administration (renamed the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, in 1937), a federal agency created to document and remedy the plight of the urban and rural poor in the 1930s. The photograph’s pictorial strength and emotional impact, combined with its recurring presence in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, and displays, cemented its place in America’s collective memory of the era.
Does MoMA license audio?
MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/circulating-film.
Dorothea Lange originally set up shop as a commercial portrait photographer
Born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange was raised in a fairly typical middle-class family for the time. At age 7, she contracted polio, which left her walking on a weakened right leg for the rest of her life.
It was capturing the Depression that really launched Lange's career
It was Lange's photographs of the working class plight that led to her commissioning by the Farm Security Administration, part of FDR's New Deal. She was recruited to document the plight of migrant workers by economist Paul Taylor, who also became her second husband.
How The Photo Was Taken
The Real ‘Migrant Mother’
- Then in 1978, a woman named Florence Owens Thompson wrote a letter to the editor of the Modesto Beenewspaper. She was the mother in the famous “Migrant Mother” photo, Thompson said—and she wanted to set the record straight. In an Associated Press article that followed, titled “Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo,” Thompson told a reporter that she felt “…
Life After The Famous Photo
- The family kept moving after Nipomo, following farm work from one place to another, and Florence would have three more children. After World War II, she settled in Modesto, California and married George Thompson, a hospital administrator. By 1983, five years after claiming her identity as the “Migrant Mother,” Thompson was living alone in a trailer. She suffered from cance…