Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange

A woman sits under a canvas shelter, one hand raised to her chin, staring past the camera. Two children lean on her shoulders with their faces turned away, and a baby lies in her lap. Dorothea Lange took this photograph in a few minutes in March 1936, and it became the image most people picture when they think of the Great Depression in America.

What you are looking at

This is Migrant Mother, a black-and-white photograph made at a camp of pea pickers near Nipomo, California. Lange was working for the Resettlement Administration, a federal agency later folded into the Farm Security Administration, which sent photographers around the country to document rural poverty.

The picture is tightly framed. There is almost no background: a sagging tent, a wooden tent pole on the right, nothing else. The mother is at the centre, the children make a frame around her, and because both older children hide their faces, all of the expression is left to her. Her forehead is lined, her mouth is set, and her eyes are fixed on something outside the picture.

It is one of a short series. Lange moved closer with each exposure, starting with wider views of the family in the tent and ending with this close, almost classical composition, the one that was printed and reprinted until it became famous.

The story

Lange later said she had been driving home after a month of work in the field, passed a hand-lettered sign for a pea pickers' camp, kept driving for a while, then turned back. The pea crop had frozen, so there was no work, and many families were stranded.

In her own account, written for a photography magazine in 1960, she said she did not ask the woman's name. She described being told that the family had been living on frozen vegetables from the fields and birds the children caught, and that the mother had just sold the tyres from the car to buy food.

Lange sent the pictures to the San Francisco News, which published them within days, and the government sent food to the camp. By then the family had already moved on.

The woman was Florence Owens Thompson, then 32, travelling with several of her children. She stayed unknown to the public for more than forty years, until a reporter traced her in the late 1970s. She and her family did not recognise every detail of Lange's account, and later said they had stopped at the camp because their car had broken down. Thompson said she was never paid and had felt exploited by the picture. When she was seriously ill in 1983, her family appealed for help, and donations came in from people around the country who knew her face but not her name.

What most people don't know

The original negative had a thumb in it. In the lower right corner, Thompson's own thumb was caught holding the tent pole. It was later retouched out of the negative, and the famous print has no thumb. Roy Stryker, who ran the photography unit, was reportedly unhappy about it, because the agency's pictures were supposed to be straight documents. Some early prints, made before the retouching, still show it.

The family was not the typical Dust Bowl migrant family that later stories assumed. Thompson was born in Oklahoma in what was then Indian Territory, of Cherokee descent, and had been in California for years before the photograph was taken.

The negatives belong to the American public. Because Lange took the picture as a federal employee, it is in the public domain, and the Library of Congress holds the negatives and offers high-resolution scans free online.

Why people love it

It is a picture of endurance more than despair. The mother isn't crying or asking for anything; she is thinking. People read worry in her face, but also strength, and that mix lets almost anyone see someone they know in her.

The composition makes it feel timeless. A mother with a child in her lap and others at her side is one of the oldest arrangements in art, and many viewers compare the photograph to a Madonna in a Renaissance painting. Like Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, it holds you with a face caught looking at something you can't see, though this time the sitter has a name and a life story.

It has become the face of the Depression in history books and on the covers of countless studies of the 1930s, and the US Postal Service used it on a stamp about the decade in its Celebrate the Century series. Thompson's own family has spoken about the photograph in interviews over the years, and the debate it raises, about who owns an image of someone in hardship, is part of why people keep coming back to it.

How to see it

The negatives are in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, in the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information collection of the Prints and Photographs Division. They are not on display, but you can view and download the whole series, including the frames taken before it, on the library's website.

Vintage prints are held by several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Lange's personal archive is at the Oakland Museum of California. Prints are light-sensitive and usually shown only in rotation or in special exhibitions, so check with the museum before you travel.

If you can see a print in person, look at the mother's hand: the fingers resting against her mouth carry as much of the feeling as her eyes. Then look at the series as a whole online and watch Lange move in, frame by frame, until only the family is left.