Dorothea Lange, the dust bowl,
and an iconic image.
Beverly, today we're talking about an iconic photograph.
Let's start with the basics.
Tell me what we're looking at here today.
We're looking at a photograph of Florence Thompson,
better known as "Migrant Mother."
It was made in March 1936.
This is one of the best-known photographs in the world.
Dorothea Lange was out in California
and kept seeing these people coming with their jalopies
and all their children and looking for work
and made photographs of people like this on her own,
but then she did such a good job of it,
she came to the notice
of the Farm Security Administration people
in Washington, D.C.,
who hired her to work for them,
and this is one of the pictures that she made.
So the government essentially hired her
to document the migrant workers
to give Americans a sense of what was going on
in the dust bowl at that time.
in the time before television,
people didn't know what was going on
in other parts of the country.
They would hear something.
They would see a newspaper picture.
but they didn't really have
a personal sense of what was happening.
Dorothea Lange had gone out to make pictures of pea pickers
in Nipomo, California.
this woman, Florence Thompson,
was camped out by the side of the road.
so she attracted Lange's notice.
so she went up very slowly and engaged in conversation,
asked if she could make some pictures,
and the woman agreed,
reluctantly, according to her family later,
but she agreed to it.
It's not that Dorothea Lange just pointed her camera,
took one picture, packed up, and went home; is that right?
She actually took a series?
Right, she did make a series.
probably this is the first one
because it's farthest away from her subject.
A teenage girl is sitting in a chair.
The rest of the people are inside the tent.
She gets in closer and closer.
She works just with the mother and the baby,
and the mother is looking down.
She doesn't want to make eye contact
with this photographer.
She doesn't want to be part of this.
Her story was that she was promised
the pictures would never be published.
Dorothea Lange's story was that she told her
she was making the picture to try to get help for them.
Now we come to the iconic, famous photograph.
Dorothea Lange took the photo,
and then it very quickly became popular.
Is that accurate?
Correct.
Dorothea Lange published it in a California newspaper article
almost immediately.
It attracted enormous amounts of attention
and did, in fact, bring help to the migrant labor camps.
Would you say that it has entered our visual vocabulary?
It is probably one of the foundation stones
of our visual vocabulary today.
Beverly Brannan, curator of photography,
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.