The most famous photo from the Great Depression is “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange. Lange was born in 1895. She contracted polio at age 7 and it weakened her right leg and left her with a permanent limp. At age 17, her father abandoned the family. She took her mother’s maiden name. She studied photography at Columbia University and then opened a portrait studio. When the Great Depression started, she decided she wanted to chronicle its effects on people. She got a job with the Farm Security Administration. She took pictures of sharecroppers, migrant workers, and okies. One day in 1936, she was on the road heading home from weeks of taking pictures when she passed a sign saying “Pea-Pickers Camp”. She passed it by, but her conscience got her to make a u-turn to go to the camp. While there she met a woman who was living in a tent with her seven kids. Lange decided to take some pictures of her. She took a total of 6. One of them has the mother nursing her baby. The iconic photo came when Lange asked two of the children to join their mother and the baby in the frame. She wanted the photo to focus on the mother’s face, so Dorothea asked the kids to turn their faces from the camera. When Lange developed the photos, she knew she had something with “Migrant Mother”. It was published in a newspaper and soon became the iconic picture of the Great Depression. Lange became famous from it, but the woman got nothing. Lange had been in a hurry to get home, so she only spent ten minutes in the camp and did not get the woman’s name. It was not until the 1978 that a newspaper reporter found her living in a trailer. Florence Owens Thompson was living in poverty, as she had for most of her life. She was bitter about having been exploited by Lange. At the time of the photo, she was 32. She was traveling with her partner and her seven kids. They were going from picking beets to picking lettuce when their car broke down near the pea-pickers camp. Bad weather had destroyed the pea crop so the thousands in the camp were desperate. Thompson’s family survived from eating frozen vegetables from the fields and birds the kids killed. Ironically, after the photo ran in newspapers, the government sent 20,000 tons of food to the camp, but Thompson had moved on. 42 years later, after the publishing of a newspaper article about her, she received over $35,000 from readers touched by her story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Mother
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange
https://www.history.com/news/migrant-mother-new-deal-great-depression
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