by Linda Gordon
Lange typically made two kinds of portraits—those that captured the subject in direct engagement with the photographer and those made as the subject had become enough accustomed to the camera that she began to ignore it. Migrant Mother was of the latter. It was one of a series of six or seven photographs, and from their variety, it is clear that Lange asked the mother and children to move into several different positions. She began with a mid-distance shot. Then she backed up for one shot, then came closer for the others.4 She moved aside a pile of dirty clothes. (She would never embarrass her subjects.) She then moved closer yet, focusing on three younger children and sidelining the teenage daughter out of the later pictures altogether.5 Then this master photographer of children made the unusual decision to ask the two youngsters leaning on their mother to turn their faces away from the camera. She was building the drama and impact of the photograph by forcing the viewer to focus entirely on Florence Thompson’s beauty and anxiety, and by letting the children’s bodies, rather than their faces, express their dependence on their mother. It was the same compositional strategy that made White Angel Breadline so powerful.
Feeling that she had captured what she could of this moment, Lange then returned to Highway 101 and drove home to Berkeley. When she developed the negatives, she knew she had something strong, and she offered the photographs to the press. The San Francisco News published two of them on March 10, 1936. In response, contributions of $200,000 poured in for the destitute farmworkers stuck in Nipomo.
MIGRANT MOTHER HAS been so often reproduced that critics call it an icon. It was used for a thirty-two-cent postage stamp, in political campaign literature, in advertisements for all sorts of commodities, for charity fund-raising, and for magazine covers. The Black Panthers put an Afro on the mother. A right-wing Web site compares it to Josef Goebbels’s creation of the storm trooper icon Horst Wessel.6 When I asked my university students if they knew who Dorothea Lange was, almost all said no. But when I asked them to tell me their visual images of the Depression, many described this photograph. Within that association, its meaning varies: it can connote victimization, the irrepressible resilience of Americans, or the selflessness of mothers. The picture could be said even to stand for the nation, much as Marianne stands for France—Migrant Mother is the enduring, ultimately invincible nation enduring a terrible collective tragedy. It functions as an “aide-memoire for activating a ‘structure of feeling.’ ”7
The image evokes several powerful historical ideas and clichés about motherhood, all of them highly ideological. Her children lean on her because she is a pillar of strength. Not only do they lean on her but there is no space separating the four members of this family; they have become, as they began, one flesh. The mother’s worry expresses her need to nurture and protect them at any cost. Nothing will induce her to walk away from her motherly responsibility. Like so many other mothers, she has worked hard but reaped no reward or security. She is overpowered by circumstances she cannot control. She is absolutely innocent of any blame. We somehow know that she has already done her utmost and is in danger of running out of survival strategies. She may even strengthen associations of women with weakness, as she is paralyzed with anxiety rather than active. Other iconic meanings call uniquely on the Christian tradition: Migrant Mother is a Madonna, of course, a mother holy because she is pure and asexual. More, she is at the center of a holy family.8
Photography scholar Sally Stein, however, suggests that if the photograph were only a Madonna, it would have less power. She argues that the photograph also contains a tension that has added to its force, however unconsciously. Stein points out that the mother is so merged with her children as to be in bondage, locked in through this visual compression. Mothers are workers, and Lange, as the quintessential photographer of working people and one who found motherhood hard work, was exquisitely aware of that. But motherhood is indentured labor, not free. It is love itself that imprisons. Moreover, as Stein points out, her arm and face push forward of her children. She is alone in a crowd, looking away from the others, like the man in White Angel Breadline. Her children use their hands to touch her, but she does not return the gesture. Moreover, Madonnas usually look at their child; Migrant Mother does not. The “picture lacked most of the sentimental cues that make the mother and child formula work, or work easily, as secular variant of sacred conviction,” Stein concludes.
Lange herself sometimes wondered why this photo in particular became so much used; she knew it to be a fine photograph, but she had made many others of equal strength. Why a specific image is unusually gripping remains mysterious, but, as Stein argues, Migrant Mother’s inner tension, precisely its lack of resolution, contributes to its power. Lange made flattering photographs, but her tastes did not run to conventional prettiness. She was exquisitely sensitive to embodied emotion, but she also probably felt the complexity of Thompson’s anxiety because it was hers, as well. Nothing in Lange’s personal life was as fraught as her own motherhood and she lived with contradictory impulses every day.
ANTI–NEW DEAL Republicans frequently charged that FSA photographs were slanted. Roy Stryker defended them by insisting on their truth, but not all his staff shared his literal-minded definition of truth. So he had been burned when the anti-Roosevelt press discovered that FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein had moved a steer skull a few yards to make a more powerful image of the drought.9 In response to another conservative attack, Stryker denied, mistakenly, that Lange had posed the family members in Migrant Mother, his denial implying that to have done so would be cheating. He complained when Lange retouched the photograph, removing a fragment of Florence Thompson’s thumb that intruded into the composition. Forty years later, a scholar accused Lange of staging a June 1938 photograph of another family by having thrown something on the ground that would cause a toddler to turn around and look at it.10 Yet at times, Stryker instructed his photographers to stage photographs. “If possible,” he wrote Rothstein, “get . . . Debt Adjustment Committees at work (even if staged). . . .”11
Why was retouching or staging a suspect technique? Why did these issues matter? They arose because the common understanding of photography as mechanical reproduction collided with the political weight of documentary photography in the Depression. This concern for authenticity, as critic William Stott discerned, pervaded 1930s political culture, including both visual and textual arts.12 The documentary mode matched the federal government’s increasing reliance on empirical data in promoting its policies. The very effectiveness of politically engaged photography stimulated opponents to challenge its authenticity. From a different political perspective, Stryker shared their assumptions, and used a courtroom analogy: that his photographs functioned as evidence, building a case for federal policy. He aimed at “annexing the emergent prestige and authority of professional photojournalism to the already established ‘scientific’ reliability of experts in social science. . . .”13 (Stryker knew that he could never justify funding his photography project if its products were considered art.) Forensic or news photographers might have agreed that they should not retouch or rearrange their subjects, but they could not avoid framing each photograph so as to include or exclude; the viewer can never know what is just outside the frame.
Seventy years later, this concept of authenticity seems not only vague and superficial but ideological. Prohibiting rearranging a group so as to make a more compelling portrait rests on a concept of truth as immediately evident to the senses, never requiring analysis and understanding. This concept would make truth captive to common-sense, conventional appearances, while Lange was determined to disrupt the constant temptation to see conventionally, in order to provoke deeper questions. Lange’s FSA colleague Jack Delano argued, “It isn’t something you happen to see, a documentary photograph is an expression of the essence of what you are seeing.”14 Lange managed photographic scenes so as to expose truths not readily accessible. She loved a Chinese proverb: The eyes are blind to what the mind does not see.15
SEVERAL DECADES AFTER the photograph was made, a journalist searched out Florence Thompson and discovered that she was a “full-blooded” Cherokee. This fact adds to the ironies of the photograph’s trajectory. Its reputation grew because it symbolized white motherhood and white dust bowl refugees. If Lange had interviewed Mrs. Thompson at greater length, would she have learned her history and origins? It is not clear whether Thompson was claiming an Indian identity at the time. Would the photograph have had such popularity if viewers had known that its subject was a “woman of color”? Lange would have welcomed this knowledge. But would Stryker have distributed it?17 Probably not.
Within a decade, certainly by 1955, when it was published in the Museum of Modern Art’s Family of Man, the photograph of Florence Thompson had traveled the world. As public property, it was available for any person or corporation to use for any purpose whatever without fee. In 1958 Thompson and her family saw it in U.S. Camera and wrote to the magazine to complain, and their letter is in itself a fascinating document, suggesting how even those of limited education might use the language of rights to assert themselves:
This photo since has been displayed In the Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco, also Two Years ago it was called to My attention that it appeared in Look Magazine . . . [and] in U.S. Camera. . . . Since I have not been consulted . . . I request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines. . . . You would do Dorothea Lange a great Favor by Sending me her address That I may Inform her that should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three Daughters shall be Forced to Protect our rights. Trusting that it will not be necessary to use Drastic Means to force you to Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission to Use my Picture in your Publication I remain
Respectfully
Florence Thompson18
Lange was shaken—frightened and miserable that her photograph had caused grief.19 Of course she had earned no money from the image and could not control its use, so Florence Thompson had no grounds for a suit. But Thompson’s anger is understandable: She felt that she had been stereotyped as a Grapes of Wrath character, an Okie, and that she gained nothing from the photograph, and she assumed that Lange had profited handsomely. Thompson also charged that Lange had promised and failed to send her a copy, and had guaranteed that the photograph would not be published. These claims are dubious, because Lange knew well that all FSA pictures could be published, because Lange never promised to send copies, and because FSA photographers never took names, in keeping with project guidelines. Once Lange’s relationship to the photograph was clarified, Thompson and her family withdrew their complaint, and today Thompson’s daughter speaks positively about the making of the photograph: “She asked my mother if she could take her picture—that . . . her name would never be published, but it was to help the people in the plight that we were all in, the hard times,” Peggy McIntosh says. “So mother let her take the picture, because she thought it would help.”20
Nevertheless, Thompson’s feelings deserve respect. Her description of the encounter helps explain how she understood it: “a shiny new car” approached; “A well-dressed woman got out with a large camera.”21 Lange’s car was not likely to have been shiny after many days on the alternately muddy and dusty roads around California fields, and she was equally unlikely to have looked well dressed. Thompson’s memory, like all memory, had no doubt modulated over the years. But her emotional memory was true, because Lange clearly came from another world. She was a woman driving alone, her big camera a mark of authority. And what this woman took—photographs—belies Lange’s view that she was not taking anything from her subject. In capturing Thompson and her children, ragged and worn, Lange may have taken a bit of their pride. As one Okie told Lange, “I never have wrote back home and told my folks that we live in a tent. I’ve wrote that we’re well and such as that but I never have wrote that we live in a tent.”22 These feelings raise questions of social ethics. Is it best to capture a farmworker in her ragged dress so that she will evoke pity and, possibly, help? Or to allow her the opportunity to present herself as she wishes? Does the former make the subject doubly victimized, first by the society and economy, then again by the documentarian? Thompson may have felt like the Mexican farmworker in Calexico who did not want to be photographed because “we have shame thees house.” (See chapter 9.) As a black minister told Robert Coles in 1963, “I wonder about who’s doing the ‘documenting,’ and what a person has in mind to see . . . will they document our tears but not our smiles? . . . I know we need outsiders to lend us a hand. . . . But . . . we’ll end up appearing the way the Klan people want us to appear—as bad off as animals, and all the time whining, like a cat or dog.”23 Florence Thompson felt that she had been portrayed that way, and had been humiliated.24
Lange did not share any of these ethical doubts. Like her mother and her husband, she felt a responsibility to help. True, her approach to Thompson had deviated from her typical use of conversation, even “seductiveness,” as one critic put it,25 to mitigate a subject’s stiffness or shame. Approaching Thompson that day in February, she was too tired to seduce and probably became pushy. But although often introspective about photography, Lange never worried about potential harm to subjects. She was so sure that she was doing good that there was no room for such doubts.
Florence Thompson did not have an easy life after the photograph. As she charged, she got no benefit from the picture; more broadly, her life points to the failure of Lange’s and Taylor’s hopes for economic democracy. Thompson remained for some time a farmworker, struggling to support her ten children. In 1978, a reporter for the Modesto Bee discovered her living in a mobile home and interviewed her; she again complained that she should have received some money and threatened a lawsuit. She was then living on $331.60 a month from Social Security, with an extra $44.40 for medical expenses. In 1979, another journalist, Bill Ganzel, included her in a larger project of tracking down Depression photographic subjects. She was in the news again in August 1983, when she was terminally ill with cancer, heart disease, and the effects of a stroke, and one of her sons informed a reporter that the family couldn’t handle the $1,400 weekly medical expenses. In the end, Lange was able to help Thompson’s family in a small way: The publicity surrounding this article stimulated contributions amounting to more than thirty thousand dollars. Thompson died in September 1983.26
14
On the Road:
The Dust Bowl
The dust bowl is a defining national legend, of mythic status in American history, and Dorothea Lange helped construct that myth. It was the dust bowl that made Lange an environmentalist; Taylor would expound during their long hours on the road, but it was what she saw that crystallized his teachings into emotional understanding. Dorothea understood all things best by seeing.
The visual metaphors in Lange’s dust bowl photographs tell an environmental story. At the core of Lange’s developing environmentalism was a narrative—of relations between people and nature, each altering the other. The earth itself comes first. She tried to photograph a few dust storms but rarely captured the swirling dust, which made her images seem merely fuzzy.1 She got better effect from the dunes of dust, the drifts that covered fences, farm equipment, storage cellars, even the first-floor windows of houses. More importantly, she showed causes: the vast plowed fields where once prairie grass grew, now defenseless against the wind; the men on tractors, ripping up the so
il yet again despite the years of failure.
A second theme, desertion, begins with the parched fields, naked and exposed, deserted by all vegetation. Then the pictures move on to human desertion: abandoned farmhouses, forgotten plows, relics of human society. There are the vacant central squares of towns, the wide main streets nearly empty of vehicles, the stores boarded up, their signs peeling. Several FSA photographers worked in the drought-stricken plains, but no one matched Lange’s images of the human costs of the disaster.2
14.1. NEW MEXICO, SPRING 1935
That year the spring come and found us blank.
A third theme repeats Lange’s Depression specialty: dejected men. In the dust bowl area, these are typically groups of men in conversation—the drought area consisted of small towns where people knew one another. (By contrast, the images of dejected unemployed in her San Francisco photographs express not only their hopelessness but also their isolation, signaling Lange’s growing anxiety about cities.) The men appear by the sides of the empty, silent main streets. They are all gaunt. Some stand, some squat, some lean on cars. Some are in overalls, but many wear better trousers, clothes for going to town, because there is no farmwork for them to do. They all wear hats, some of straw, some fedoras, some cowboy hats. Many attend morning movies for a few cents because there is nothing else to do. In these towns, there are no women, an absence that tells an important story: When there was no farmwork for men to do, they idled with one another, while the women were working harder than ever, trying to keep homes, bodies, clothing, food and water clean; trying to put together meals with little food in the larder or money in the coffee can; trying to keep animals alive and human spirits a margin away from crippling depression.
14.2. CALIPATRIA, IMPERIAL VALLEY, 1937
