STANDARDS

Common Core: RH.6-8.1, RH.6-8.2, RH.6-8.4, RH.6-8.6, RH.6-8.7, RH.6-8.9, WHST.6-8.4, RI.6-8.1, RI.6-8.2, RI.6-8.4, RI.6-8.6, RI.6-8.7, RI.6-8.9, W.6-8.4, SL.6-8.1

NCSS: Culture • Time, Continuity, and Change • People, Places, and Environments • Individual Development and Identity • Production, Distribution, and Consumption

U.S. HISTORY

SSPL via Getty Images

Lange shot this photograph of Florence Owens Thompson in March 1936. Known as Migrant Mother, it is one of the most iconic photos ever taken.

Portraits of an Era

Photographer Dorothea Lange documented the struggles and the dignity of Americans during the 1930s in some of history’s most compelling images.

Click here to take a Prereading Quiz before you read this article.

As You Read, Think About: What impact did Dorothea Lange’s photos have when they were taken? What do they say to us today?

The Granger Collection

Dorothea Lange with her camera, around 1935

Dorothea Lange was beyond exhausted. It was a cold, rainy March morning in 1936, during the height of the Great Depression (see "A Decade of Struggle," below). The photographer had been on the road for weeks without a break, capturing the plight of struggling farmers with her camera. Driving up a long stretch of California highway past fruit and vegetable fields, she was in a hurry to get back to her home just outside San Francisco. Near the town of Nipomo, she passed a hand-drawn sign: Pea-Picker’s Camp. Lange considered stopping but didn’t. She had all the photos she needed for this trip, she thought. Then, 20 miles on, she turned back.

“I was following instinct, not reason,” Lange later wrote. “I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon.” 

Approaching with her camera, she found 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson and several of her children living in a makeshift tent. Like thousands of other migrant families, Thompson’s had fled drought-stricken Oklahoma, desperately looking for work on California’s farms. But weeks of heavy rain had kept them from picking peas as they had hoped, and then frost had killed the crop. The family had no money, their car had broken down, and they were reduced to scavenging the frozen fields for scraps to eat.

Lange’s encounter with the family was brief. She took seven pictures of Thompson and her children, then left. But the impact of those photographs is still felt to this day, scholars say. Lange helped change the way people around the world viewed those who were suffering during the Great Depression. One close-up shot of Thompson, eventually known as Migrant Mother, would become symbolic of hard times and human resilience. It is also one of the most famous photographs ever taken.

A Decade of Struggle

On October 29, 1929, the world suffered a massive financial shock when the U.S. stock market collapsed. It sent the global economy into a tailspin that is called the Great Depression.

Very quickly, countless businesses and banks closed. People lost their life savings. By 1933, a quarter of Americans were unemployed. Long lines of the hungry waiting for a free meal became common.

On the Great Plains of the U.S., the 1930s came with an added burden. For years, farmers had dug up prairie grass to plant wheat and other crops. As the Depression hit, the price of wheat plummeted and farms began to fail. 

Then severe drought hit the region. Without crops or grass, endless miles of soil dried up and were carried away by the wind, creating a huge area called the Dust Bowl.

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, pledging a New Deal for Americans. Under his leadership, federal programs helped bring jobs and relief. By the end of the 1930s, the Depression was largely over.

Learning Her Way

The future chronicler of the Great Depression was born in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. At age 7, she contracted polio, which weakened the muscles in her right leg and left her with a lifelong limp. “I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me,” Lange said later. It made her more determined, she would say, and more empathetic toward others.

As a teen, Lange was drawn to photography. At the time, few people had cameras. With no idea how to use one, she got a series of jobs in nearby New York City and learned. Working with a portrait photographer taught her how to put people at ease when they posed in front of a lens. 

At age 22, Lange relocated to San Francisco. There, she opened a studio and built a successful business taking portraits of wealthy clients. But in the early 1930s, the Great Depression changed everything. Lange lost a lot of business. Out on the city’s streets, unemployed men waited in long breadlines or at soup kitchens for food handouts. Following her instincts, Lange grabbed her camera one day in 1933 and headed outside.

Gift of Paul S. Taylor © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California/via Alamy Stock Photo

This is the first photo Lange shot on the streets, in 1933. Called White Angel Breadline, it shows the desperation of unemployed men waiting for food.

“A Hunk of Lightning”

That wasn’t a simple task. “I wasn’t accustomed to jostling about in groups of tormented, depressed, and angry men with a camera,” she later said. Plus, Lange used a large, bulky portrait camera called a Graflex. Her small size, and her limp, made it hard to carry. Yet Lange kept conquering her unease to get back on the street—“to see if I can just grab a hunk of lightning,” she told herself. 

In the summer of 1934, Paul Taylor, a professor who studied agricultural economies, saw some of her street photographs at a gallery. “He had never seen photography that had the emotional impact of hers,” says Linda Gordon, a Lange biographer. That year, a California government agency hired Taylor to document the conditions of farmworkers. He took Lange with him as a photographer.

Lange helped change the way people viewed the Great Depression.

She saw firsthand the plight of migrants from Great Plains states who were fleeing the devastation of the Dust Bowl. During the 1930s, some 200,000 of them streamed into California, looking for work. Jobs on farms were scarce and paid hardly anything. Then when the picking season was over, the migrants had to move on again in search of work, in an endless cycle. 

Lange’s years of making people comfortable in front of a camera served her well. “I think that she deliberately emphasized her limp and her slowness,” says Gordon. Lange used the time to talk to her subjects. Getting them to relax into what she called their “natural body language” allowed them to let down their guard, Gordon says. The resulting images offered revealing glimpses into people’s everyday lives.

Migrant Mother

In 1933, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt began to implement a series of programs, called the New Deal, to pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression. During the summer of 1935, Lange began to work for the federal government, now taking her camera throughout the Southwest.

While she sometimes traveled with Taylor or had a driver, Lange also went out by herself. She was alone on that day in March 1936 when she encountered Florence Owens Thompson at the Nipomo pea pickers’ camp. With her trained eye, the photographer zeroed in on the mother’s face. 

“I am trying here to say something about the despised, the defeated.”

“It is a face that is at once very stressed, lined,” says Gordon. “At the same time, it is a face of great beauty.” It belongs to someone who has seen a lot of hardship and yet has great strength, she explains.

For the final shot, Lange had two of the children tuck their heads behind their mother to highlight Thompson’s face. In that moment, Lange created Migrant Mother. It is more than just a photographic record of a subject in the field, Gordon says. It is also a work of art.

Slideshow

Like the Mona Lisa

Within days, the San Francisco News ran three of the photos along with articles about Nipomo. Already, Lange’s visit to the camp had prompted the state of California to rush food to the stranded migrants there. Soon other newspapers around the country began to publish the photos. Through them, Americans came to see how some of those on the margins of society lived. 

Lange continued to work. A number of her photos over the next few years captured people on the move—walking down long roads or piled into cars with all their worldly belongings. She made many images of sharecroppers, farmers who earned almost nothing working land they didn’t own. But along with struggle, Lange documented moments of ordinary family life—including kids at work and play.

By 1939, the worst of the Great Depression was over. Lange left her job with the government a few years later. She continued working until her death at age 70 in 1965. Yet the photos she took in the 1930s remain her best known. “I am trying here to say something about the despised, the defeated . . . the helpless, the rootless, the dislocated,” she wrote of her images from that time. 

Foremost among them is Migrant Mother—today perhaps the most reproduced and imitated photo of all time. The image of Thompson is so well-known, it has been compared to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

The photo’s power as both history and art remains undimmed over time, writes scholar Sarah Meister. “It continues to resonate with struggles that persist in the world,” she says. “A single photograph can help anchor our understanding of the past—and [identify] a challenge we want to address in the future.” 

SKILL SPOTLIGHT: Analyzing Photos

Dorothea Lange’s work includes many photos of kids, including these boys in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1938.

Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress

1. What do you notice about this photo? What are the boys doing? 

2. How would you describe the mood of the photo? How does that mood compare with the other photos in this article?

3. How do Lange’s photos add to your understanding of the Great Depression? 

Leveled Articles (1)
PDF
Leveled Text: Portraits of an Era

A lower-Lexile® version of the article in a printer-friendly PDF

Text-to-Speech