Dorothea Lange’s 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson and her daughters is so well-known that finding anything new to say about it seems futile. Yet as with the Mona Lisa — to which the “Migrant Mother” photo has been compared — the image retains an air of mystery.
But “Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother,” a new book from the Museum of Modern Art, offers fresh insights as it weaves a compelling tale about some little-explored details. Written by Sarah Meister, a photography curator at MoMA, the book comes out at a time when faces of desperately poor people in migrant caravans dominate the news.
“I thought, could there possibly be anything new to say about this picture?” Ms. Meister said. “But Lange is so important. I find her politics so admirable. Her sense of commitment and her ability to distill very important and complex arguments into imagery that made those arguments seem absolutely impossible to ignore. It feels particularly timely.”
Because the photograph was made while Ms. Lange was working for the federal Farm Security Administration, the photo is available to everyone, and it has been used in many ways, including as a postage stamp, a 1,000-piece puzzle and on trinkets, T-shirts, posters and postcards.
Part of why so many people related to the image was, perhaps, the anonymity of this family, which could have been any of millions of Americans suffering through the Great Depression, Ms. Meister said. But in 1978, Ms. Thompson wrote to the editor of the Modesto Bee newspaper explaining that she was the woman in the photo — and that she felt exploited because she was never compensated for the image.
A subsequent Associated Press article in The Los Angeles Times revealed that Ms. Thompson was not of European descent — as had been commonly assumed — but “a full-blooded Cherokee Indian” from Oklahoma. That detail, Ms. Meister said, raises the compelling question of whether “Migrant Mother” would have resonated so widely if viewers knew the subjects were Native American.
“We have never been a race-blind country, frankly,” Ms. Meister said. “I wish that I could say that the response would have been the same if everyone had been aware that she was Cherokee, but I don’t think that you can.”
Ms. Meister says she doesn’t think that Ms. Lange knew the details of Ms. Thompson’s background. Unlike with most of her other assignments, there are no known field notes from Ms. Lange about this shoot in Nipomo, Calif., and the captions in the Library of Congress are, Ms. Meister said, most likely inaccurate: Ms. Thompson’s relatives have insisted, for example, that they did not sell their tent for food as the captions declared.
With help from librarians at the San Francisco Public Library, Ms. Meister pieced together how the inaccurate caption information probably came about. After Ms. Lange filed her pictures to The San Francisco News, a reporter for United Press went to the migrant encampment in Nipomo. Although Ms. Lange — and, apparently, the Thompson family — had left days earlier, her photos were published with the United Press’s reporter’s article. Details from it appear in the captions in the Library of Congress, Ms. Meister said.
This edition of Ms. Meister’s book is part of “One on One,” a series in which each volume delves into a single piece in MoMA’s collection. The volume on “Migrant Mother” explores a print that was made for MoMA’s 1949 exhibit “Six Women Photographers.”
Which brings us to the case of the missing thumb.
It is easy to tell whether a print of “Migrant Mother” was made before 1939, because that year Ms. Lange had an assistant retouch the negative and remove Ms. Thompson’s thumb from the bottom right corner, much to the chagrin of Roy Stryker, her boss at the Farm Security Administration. While that was a fairly common practice at the time, Mr. Stryker thought it compromised the authenticity not just of the photo but also of his whole F.S.A. documentary project, Ms. Meister said. But Ms. Lange considered the thumb to be such a glaring defect that she apparently didn’t have a second thought about removing it. In the print from the Library of Congress below, the thumb is still in the image’s lower right corner.
Even The New York Times altered the image, including once where “the children had been removed, and the dingy interior of the tent made to appear as wisps of clouds in a bright sky,” Ms. Meister wrote. The paper also ran a heavily retouched print on July 26, 1936, shown above, that heightened the contrast between the mother and the background, “minimizing the presence of Thompson’s offending thumb.”
Ms. Meister said she loved “an unsolved mystery,” so searching for the answers of whether “Migrant Mother” was made in February or March 1936, or where the captions came from and why they upset the family, was satisfying. But to her, correcting the historical record was especially meaningful.
“As a civilization we need to be able to establish facts and still accept that for some people this might represent the pinnacle of motherhood,” she said. “For others this might represent the depth of the Depression; and for others this might represent a suppressing of racial identity. Each of those interpretations is perfectly valid so long as we agree on the facts.
“I don’t believe there are alternative facts,” she said. “I think you can have alternative interpretations.”