The first publication of this renowned image occurred on March 11, 1936, on the third day that the San Francisco News ran a story about the pea pickers’ camp at Nipomo. It was also featured as a full-page reproduction in September 1936 issue of Survey Graphic, titled “Draggin’-Around People” and captioned “A blighted pea crop in California in 1935 left the pickers without work. This family sold their tent to get food.” Also in this issue was an article by Taylor entitled “From the Group Up.” His report on demonstration projects of the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and California was illustrated with four more picture by Lange.
Since it was first published, this composition, best known as Migrant Mother, has come to represent not only the pictorial archive created by the RA/FSA during the 1930s but also the Great Depression itself. Posters and other publicity of later activists fighting racial, economic, and political oppression have borrowed from Lange’s icon of the time. The handsome, androgynous face, the pose of stoic anxiety, and the encumbrance of three young children proved to be universal attributes. With Lange’s artistry, Owens took on the timeless quality of Eugéne Delacroix’s strong female rebel (Liberty Leading the People), Jean-François Millet’s peasant woman (the agrarian ideal), Honoré Daumier’s laundresses (the working woman) and Käthe Kollwitz’s proletarian woman warrior (one of the mothers leading her Peasants’ War).
Owens, although she became famous, did not enjoy, even momentarily, the life of a celebrity. She had three more children and kept moving with her family, following the California crops. She did become involved in efforts to organize farm labor and would sometimes serve as the straw boss, one who negotiates wages for migrants as the picking season begins. She was still working in the fields at age fifty before finally marrying again (to George Thompson) and settling into a stable life in Modesto, California.
Exhibitions
Tradition and Innovation: Recent Additions to the Photographs Collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (Los Angeles), June 20–October 8, 2000; The Public Record: Photographs of the Great Depression from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Pomona College Museum of Art (Claremont), March 10–May 19, 2002; About Life: The Photographs of Dorothea Lange, the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (Los Angeles), October 15, 2002–February 9, 2003; Photographers of Genius, the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (Los Angeles), March 16–July 25, 2004; In Focus: The Worker, the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (Los Angeles), November 3, 2009–March 21, 2010; Route 66: The Road and the Romance, Autry National Center (Los Angeles), June 7–January 4, 2015.
Bibliography
Keller, Judith. About Life: The Photographs of Dorothea Lange, exh. brochure (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum), cover; Keller, Judith. In Focus: Dorothea Lange. Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p.33; The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Collections. 7th ed. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), p. 309, ill.