What Happened to the Woman Featured in Migrant Mother After Dorothea Lange Photographed Her?
It's one of the virtually iconic photos in American history. A adult female in ragged clothing holds a baby as two more than children huddle close, hiding their faces behind her shoulders. The female parent squints into the distance, i hand lifted to her rima oris and anxiety etched deep in the lines on her face.
From the moment information technology first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco newspaper in March 1936, the image known as "Migrant Mother" came to symbolize the hunger, poverty and hopelessness endured by and so many Americans during the Nifty Depression. The photographer Dorothea Lange had taken the shot, along with a serial of others, days before in a camp of migrant farm workers in Nipomo, California.
Lange was working for the federal government'due south Resettlement Administration—later the Farm Security Assistants (FSA)—the New Deal-era agency created to help struggling subcontract workers. She and other FSA photographers would have near 80,000 photographs for the organization between 1935 to 1944, helping wake upward many Americans to the desperate plight of thousands of people displaced from the drought-ravaged region known as the Dust Bowl.
How the Photo Was Taken
Scout: The 'Migrant Mother' Photo
"I saw and approached the hungry and drastic mother, equally if drawn by a magnet," Lange told Popular Photography magazine in 1960. She had spotted a sign for the migrant workers' campsite driving north on Highway 101 through San Luis Obispo County, some 175 miles north of Los Angeles. Bad weather had destroyed the local pea crop, and the pickers were out of piece of work, many of them on the brink of starvation.
Lange didn't ask the woman's proper name, or notice out her history. She claimed the woman told her she was 32, that she and her children were living on frozen vegetables and birds the children had killed, and that she had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.
Soon subsequently the photos were published in the San Francisco News, the U.S. government appear it was sending 20,000 pounds of nutrient to the pea-pickers' army camp. But by the time information technology arrived, the still-bearding woman and her family unit had moved on. Even every bit her prototype was widely reprinted and reproduced on everything from mag covers to postage stamps, the "Migrant Mother" herself appeared to have vanished.
The Existent 'Migrant Mother'
Dorothea Lange'southward famous "Migrant Mother" photograph.
From the New York Public Library
Then in 1978, a woman named Florence Owens Thompson wrote a letter to the editor of the Modesto Bee newspaper. She was the female parent in the famous "Migrant Mother" photograph, Thompson said—and she wanted to set the record straight.
Scroll to Go on
In an Associated Printing article that followed, titled "Adult female Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photograph," Thompson told a reporter that she felt "exploited" by Lange's portrait. As Geoffrey Dunn wrote in the San Luis Obispo New Times in 2002, Thompson and her children disputed other details in Lange'southward account, and sought to dispel the image of themselves as stereotypical Dust Bowl refugees.
Built-in in Oklahoma, Thompson was actually a pedigree Native American; both her parents were Cherokee. In the mid-1920s, she and her first husband, Cleo Owens, moved to California, where they found manufactory and farm work. Cleo died of tuberculosis in 1931, and Florence was left to support half dozen children past picking cotton fiber and other crops.
When Beak Ganzel, a lensman for Nebraska Public Television, interviewed and photographed Thompson in 1979, she told him that while a immature mother, she typically picked effectually 450-500 pounds of cotton a mean solar day, leaving habitation earlier daylight and coming domicile afterwards nighttime. "We just existed," she said. "Nosotros survived, let's put it that way."
When Lange found her in Nipomo that twenty-four hours in March 1936, she had two more children, and was living with a man named Jim Hill, the male parent of her baby daughter Norma. After their car broke downward on the way to notice work picking lettuce, the family unit had been forced to pull off into the pea-pickers' camp.
Ii of Florence'southward older sons were in town when the iconic pic was taken, getting the car's radiator fixed. Ane of them, Troy Owens, flatly denied that his mother had sold their tires to buy food, as Lange had claimed. "I don't believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I but think she had one story mixed upward with another," Troy told Dunn. "Or she was borrowing to make full in what she didn't accept."
Life Later the Famous Photo
Florence Owens Thompson pictured with her children in Nipomo, California, 1936.
From The New York Public Library
The family kept moving later on Nipomo, following farm work from one place to another, and Florence would have three more than children. After World War 2, she settled in Modesto, California and married George Thompson, a hospital administrator.
By 1983, v years afterwards claiming her identity as the "Migrant Mother," Thompson was living solitary in a trailer. She suffered from cancer and middle problems, and at one bespeak her children had to solicit donations for her medical expenses. According to Dunn, thousands of letters poured in, along with more $35,000 in contributions.
Florence Owens Thompson died in September 1983, but after her 80th altogether, catastrophe a life marked past economic hardship, maternal sacrifice and human dignity.
Even President Ronald Reagan offered his condolences, writing that "Mrs. Thompson'south passing represents the loss of an American who symbolizes force and conclusion in the midst of the Dandy Depression."
READ More: How the Dust Bowl Made Americans Refugees in Their Own State
Source: https://www.history.com/news/migrant-mother-new-deal-great-depression
0 Response to "What Happened to the Woman Featured in Migrant Mother After Dorothea Lange Photographed Her?"
Post a Comment