Explanation: FOR THE ENTIRE second half of Dorothea Lange’s life, a quotation from the English philosopher Francis Bacon floated in her peripheral vision: “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.” She pinned a printout of these words up on her darkroom door in 1933. It remained there until she died, at 70, in 1965 — three months before her first retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and three decades after she took the most iconic photograph in the medium’s history.
“Migrant Mother,” Lange’s 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, whose identity wasn’t known for more than 40 years, shows the rag-shrouded torso and shining face of a handsome young woman. She’s seated at a California campsite for migrant workers during the Great Depression, and yet she looks timeless. Her fingers lightly touch the corner of her mouth as she squints into the distance, two of her children hiding from the camera behind her shoulders. Overwhelming hardship but also resilience are evident in both her facial expression and body language. Taken while Lange was working for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program that aided the high volume of economically displaced, the picture was in MoMA’s inaugural photography exhibition in 1940, alongside works by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. Since then, it’s likely been exhibited there more times than any other photograph, and it is on view again at the museum’s second retrospective of Lange, which opened this month. The image, which has appeared on postage stamps, jigsaw puzzles, magazine covers and T-shirts, is familiar even to American schoolchildren. Because it was taken while Lange was a government employee, its rights are in the public domain. It can be — and is — reproduced by anyone, at any time, for any reason.
Unlike a large portion of Lange’s work, the image was never obscure. On the same day that Thompson’s likeness was published in the San Francisco News, it was announced that the federal government was sending 20,000 pounds of food to the California migrant camp where she and her children had been living. “I did not ask her name or her history,” Lange recalled. She learned her age, which was 32, and a few atmospheric details that Thompson would later dispute, but nothing more.
