Migrant Mother (or Prairie Mother), by Dorothea Lange. The last and most tightly composed of six pictures of a woman and children at a migrant pea-pickers' camp in Nipomo, California, on a wet day in early March 1936. Lange, then employed by the Resettlement Administration (RA) under Roy Stryker, visited the camp on impulse while travelling with her husband, Paul Taylor. The family seems to have been completely destitute; indeed, the woman had just sold the tyres of her car to buy food. The photographs were taken more or less without preliminaries, although the final one was evidently arranged so that the mother's face dominates the composition. Surprisingly, Lange did not record her subject's name or history; she was subsequently identified as Florence Thompson, a 32-year-old mother of seven.

Lange knew she had the picture she wanted. ‘I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers, ’ she wrote later. ‘It was not necessary; I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment.’ Her photograph appeared immediately in the San Francisco News, with the result that food was sent to the camp: a more than usually tangible effect of RA photography. Migrant Mother rapidly achieved iconic status, and in 1938, for aesthetic reasons (and despite Stryker's protests), Lange retouched the negative to remove the mother's left thumb from the foreground. It was exhibited at MoMA in 1941, was included in the Family of Man exhibition in 1955, and, between 1936 and the 1970s, was adapted as propaganda for various causes. Florence Thompson died in 1983. In 1998 an unretouched vintage print of Lange's photograph was acquired by the Getty Museum for $244, 500.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Koetzle, H.-M., Photo Icons. The Story behind the Pictures, 2: 1928-1991 (2002)

The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.