photo mag

15
“WE JUST EXISTED,
WE SURVIVED.
LET’S PUT IT THAT WAY.”
Florence Owens Thompson was born Florence Leona Christie, a
Cherokee, in a teepee in Indian Territory, Oklahoma in 1903. At age
17, she got married and moved to California for farm and millwork.
Thompson became pregnant at 28 with her sixth child and around this
time, her husband died of tuberculosis. From then on, she all kinds of
worked odd jobs to keep her children fed. During cotton harvests, she
would put her babies in bags and carry them along with her as she
worked down the rows, earning 50 cents per 100 pounds picked.
Thompson generally picked around 450,500 pounds a day. In 1963,
while driving from LA to Watsonville, her car broke down and managed
to get it towed into the Nipomo pea-pickers camp. Thompson had the
car repaired and was just about to leave when Dorothea Lange showed
up. She wasn’t eager to have her family photographed and exhibited
as specimens of poverty, but there were people starving in that camp.
Lange had convinced her that the image would educate the public
about the plight of hardworking poor people like herself.
“Migrant Mother” gently and beautifully captured the hardships and
pain of what so many other Americans were experiencing. This iconic
photo almost didn’t happen. When Dorothea Lange drove past the
“Pea-Pickers Camp” sign in Nipomo, north of Los Angeles, she kept
going for 20 miles. For the whole 20 miles, there was something
nagging her, finally deciding to turn around. Once the photographer
spotted Frances Owens Thompson, she knew she was in the right place.
Lange, who believed that one could understand others through close
study, tightly framed the children and the mother, whose eyes, worn
from worry and resignation, look past the camera. She took six photos
with her 4x5 Graflex camera and later wrote, “I knew I had recorded
the essence of my assignment.” After, Lange informed the authorities
of the plight of those at the encampment, and they sent 20,000
pounds of food. Of the 160,000 images taken by Lange and other
photographers for the Resettlement Administration, “Migrant Mother”
has become the most iconic picture of the Depression. Lange gave a
face to a suffering nation.