Dorothea Lange, 1936
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Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother". The woman in the photo is Florence 
Owens Thompson. The original photo featured Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent 
pole, but the image was later retouched to hide Florence's thumb. Her index finger was left 
untouched (lower right in photo).

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

    "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, but the impact of 
the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.

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The Photograph That Gave a Face to the Great Depression
"Migrant Mother"
Dorothea Lange, 1936

As era-defining photographs go, "Migrant Mother" pretty much takes the cake. For many, 
Florence Owens Thompson is the face of the Great Depression, thanks to legendary shutterbug 
Dorothea Lange. Lange captured the image while visiting a dusty California pea-pickers’ 
camp in February 1936, and in doing so, captured the resilience of a proud nation facing 
desperate times.

Unbelievably, Thompson’s story is as compelling as her portrait. Just 32 years old when Lange 
approached her ("as if drawn by a magnet," Lange said). Thompson was a mother of seven who’d 
lost her husband to tuberculosis. Stranded at a migratory labor farm in Nipomo, Calif. her 
family sustained themselves on birds killed by her kids and vegetables taken from a nearby 
field - as meager a living as any earned by the other 2,500 workers there. The photo’s impact 
was staggering. Reproduced in newspapers everywhere, Thompson’s haunted face triggered an 
immediate public outcry, quickly prompting politicos from the federal Resettlement 
Administration to send food and supplies. Sadly, however, Thompson and her family had already 
moved on, receiving nary a wedge of government cheese for their high-profile misery. In fact, 
no one knew the identity of the photographed woman until Thompson revealed herself years 
later in a 1976 newspaper article.