The FSA and the "Migrant Mother"

The fact that the photographer of “Migrant Mother”, Dorothea Lange, was herself a woman, was crucial to the creation of this emotionally charged photograph that has come to be known as an icon of the Great Depression. The Farm Security Administration, to which Lange was employed, hired photographers for the purpose of documenting the lives of the rural poor in America. Photographers like Lange, however, took this a step further in capturing the emotional pain and suffering of the subjects depicted in their photographs in order to encourage the viewer to feel a certain sense of sympathy for these “deserving poor”. It has been argued that the fact that Lange was a woman and in touch with her emotional intuition that she was able to form a connection to her subjects that helped to portray them in a deeper way than a straightforward documentary photograph. Her choice of subject matter in “Migrant Mother”- a poor, suffering, lonely mother of young children- was crucial to evoking the sense of sympathy that she desired the viewers to feel.

 Once the FSA had a hold of Lange’s negatives, they had exclusive rights to her photographs and could do essentially whatever they chose to do with them. The FSA used this particular image to such an extent that the woman depicted Florence Thompson, became known by her face all over the country. The ironic thing about the whole situation is that although originally, Lange took the photograph with the idea that it might one day serve to better the life of the migrant mother, Thompson publically admitted that “she had never made a penny out of it and it had done her no good”.