Lange's Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson

Lange's photo of the Japanese Relocation

Dorothea Lange (May 25, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (3000x3173, 2408 KB) Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration photographer, in California The car is a Ford Model B (AKA V8). Creation date 1936 Original file digital scan of the original negative, 20MB TIFF file, edited and converted to JPEG by User:Moondigger... May 25 is the 145th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (146th in leap years). ... 1895 (MDCCCXCV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Thursday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... Map of New Jersey highlighting Hoboken Image of Hoboken taken by NASA (red line shows where Hoboken is). ... October 11 is the 284th day of the year (285th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1965 (MCMLXV) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1965 calendar). ... The Indio Fashion Mall. ... This is a list of notable photographers in the art, documentary and fashion traditions. ... Sports photojournalists at Indianapolis Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (i. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (6205x8066, 5528 KB) Image:Lange-MigrantMother. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (6205x8066, 5528 KB) Image:Lange-MigrantMother. ... Florence Owens Thompson (September 1, 1903 - September 16, 1983), born Florence Leona Christie, is famous for being the subject of Dorothea Langes photo Migrant Mother (1936), an iconic image of the Great Depression. ... Image File history File links Japanrelocationwwii. ... Image File history File links Japanrelocationwwii. ... May 25 is the 145th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (146th in leap years). ... 1895 (MDCCCXCV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Thursday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... October 11 is the 284th day of the year (285th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1965 (MCMLXV) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1965 calendar). ... This is a list of notable photographers in the art, documentary and fashion traditions. ... Sports photojournalists at Indianapolis Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (i. ... The Great Depression was a time of economic down turn, which started after the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. ... Photo of a sharecropper by Walker Evans for the U.S. Resettlement Administration Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Photographer. ...

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, her birth name was Dorothea Margarette Nutzhorn. She eventually dropped her middle and last names, adopting her mother's maiden name of Lange. Lange developed polio in 1902, at age 7. Like many other polio victims before treatment was available, Lange emerged with a weakened and wizened right leg and dropped foot. Although she compensated well for her disability, she always limped. Map of New Jersey highlighting Hoboken Image of Hoboken taken by NASA (red line shows where Hoboken is). ... 1902 (MCMII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ...

Lange learned photography in New York City in a class taught by Clarence H. White and informally apprenticed herself to several New York photography studios, including that of the famed Arnold Genthe. In 1918, she moved to San Francisco, where she opened a successful portrait studio. She lived across the bay in Berkeley for the rest of her life. She married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon with whom she had two sons, Daniel Dixon, born 1925, and John Dixon, born 1928. New York, NY redirects here. ... Clarence Hudson White, photographed by Fred Holland Day Clarence Hudson White (1871 - 1925) was an American photographer and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. ... Self-portrait Arnold Genthe ( 1869- 1942) was a photographer, most well known for his photos of San Franciscos Chinatown and the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. ... 1918 (MCMXVIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar (see link for calendar) or a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar. ... This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ... Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in northern California, in the United States. ... 1925 (MCMXXV) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar). ... Year 1928 (MCMXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar). ...

With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The Great Depression was a time of economic down turn, which started after the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. ... This article needs to be wikified. ... Photo of a sharecropper by Walker Evans for the U.S. Resettlement Administration Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. ...

In 1935 she divorced Dixon and married agricultural economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor educated Lange in social and political matters, and together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years - Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos. Paul Schuster Taylor (born in 1895 in Sioux City, Iowa, died 1985 in Berkeley) was a progressive agricultural economist. ... Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... Sharecropping is a system of farming in which employee farmers work a parcel of land in return for a fraction of the parcels crops. ...

From 1935 to 1939, Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten - particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers - to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era. 1935 (MCMXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar). ... 1939 (MCMXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full year calendar). ...

Lange's most well-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson, but Lange apparently never knew her name. The original photo had Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent pole, and was retouched in an attempt to hide Florence's thumb. Her index finger was left untouched (lower right in photo). Florence Owens Thompson (September 1, 1903 - September 16, 1983), born Florence Leona Christie, is famous for being the subject of Dorothea Langes photo Migrant Mother (1936), an iconic image of the Great Depression. ...

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph: 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ...

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.

According to Thompson's son, Lange got some details of this story wrong^[1], but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans (Nisei) to relocation camps in the American West, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She covered the round-up of Japanese Americans, their evacuation into temporary assembly centers, and Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of young Japanese-American girls pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal. For the movie, see 1941 (film). ... Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. ... Satellite image of Pearl Harbor. ... Nisei (二世 lit. ... The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was U.S. civilian agency responsible for the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The WRA was created by President Roosevelt on March 18, 1942 with Executive Order 9102 and officially ceased to exist June 30, 1946. ... Manzanar, located approximately 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles, California in the Owens Valley, between the towns of Lone Pine, California on the south, and Independence, California on the north, is most widely-known as the site of one of ten Japanese American Internment/concentration camps where Japanese Americans were...

Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded them. Today her photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division, and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ...

In 1952 Lange co-founded of the photographic magazine Aperture. In the last two decades of her life, Lange's health was poor. She suffered from bleeding ulcers and from post-polio syndrome - although this renewal of the pain and weakness of polio was not yet recognized by most physicians. She died on October 11, 1965, aged 70. 1952 (MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Aperture is a renowned quarterly photography magazine, and also a highly respected major publisher of nearly 500 books of fine art photography. ... Post-polio syndrome (PPS) is a condition that frequently affects survivors of poliomyelitis, a viral infection of the nervous system, after recovery from an initial paralytic attack of the virus. ... October 11 is the 284th day of the year (285th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1965 (MCMLXV) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1965 calendar). ...

Lange was survived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three step-children, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

References

1. ^ Dunne, Geoffrey. "Photographic license", New Times, 2002. )

• Geoffrey Dunn, "Untitled Depression Documentary" 1980
• Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life New York, 1978
• Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange, Encyclopedia of the Depression
• Linda Gordon, Paul Schuster Taylor, American National Biography
• Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment

• [1] Civil Control Station, Registration for evacuation and processing. San Francisco, April 1942. War Relocation Authority, Photo By Dorothea Lange,From the National Archive and Records Administration taken for the War Relocation Authority courtesy of the Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley, California. Published in Image and Imagination, Encounters with the Photography of Dorothea Lange, Edited by Ben Clarke, Freedom Voices, San Francisco, 1997

• [2] Pledge of allegiance at Rafael Weill Elementary School a few weeks prior to evacuation, April, 1942. N.A.R.A.; 14GA-78 From the National Archive and Records Administration taken for the War Relocation Authority courtesy of the Bancroft Library. Published in Image and Imagination, Encounters with the Photography of Dorothea Lange, Edited by Ben Clarke, Freedom Voices, San Francisco, 1997

External links

• Article About Migrant Mother: The True Story
• Dorothea Lange - "A Photographers Journey" - Exhibition at Gendell Gallery
• 1964 oral history interview with Lange
• Essay: 'Migrant Mother', a case study in propaganda.
• Oakland Museum of California - Dorothea Lange
• Gallery of all Lange FSA photographs at the Library of Congress
• Selection of photographs in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection