Migrant Mother

Nipomo, California, early 1936, by Dorothea Lange. Florence Owens Thompson sits in a pea pickers' camp with a hand at her chin and two children turned away against her shoulders. The record's caption calls her a mother of seven, aged thirty-two; the early pea crop had failed, leaving the camp without work. Lange remembered making five exposures, working closer each time, and this close frame is the one the world knows. Thompson's name became public only in the late 1970s, and the picture has stood for the whole Depression ever since.