Migrant Madonna (and Children): Context, Intent, and Iconography in Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother

Christie Dooley

In her case study, Wells explores a range of critical approaches to Dorothea Lange's 1936 photograph, Migrant Mother. I would like to examine the recurring "mother and child" theme present in these critical writings. 

In his analysis of Migrant Mother, critic John Pultz states the following:  

The picture is created around certain notions of the female body, including the idea of the nurturing mother. Lange drew on traditional, such as Renaissance depictions of the Virgin and Child and the and the secularized versions of these that began to appear in the mid nineteenth century with the rise of the Victorian cult of domesticity. 

He implies that Lange consciously referenced artistic representations the Madonna and Child during her photographic process.

 A body of contextual information easily challenges this stance, including Lange's personal account of the photographic moment, which Wells provides. It seems unlikely that Lange was interested in linking "the hungry and desperate mother" to the Virgin Mary or any secularized counterparts. However, Lange seemed extraordinarily interested in not only documenting, but underlining this hunger and desperation, and more importantly, endurance despite hunger and desperation. After all, this mother is not simply "nurturing" her children in the passive way Renaissance Madonnas nurture Christs--as Lange mentions, the thirty-two year old woman scavenged for frozen vegetables in fields, sent her children off to kill birds, and "sold the tires from her car to buy food." Using context, we find that this individual is not at all passive, but extremely active, heroic, and as the title of Lange's photograph suggests, migrant. Furthermore, the three children are mostly hidden from sight, and thus obscured as individuals. They seem less like little Christs to be cherished, and more like additional sources of anxiety for their desperate mother--burdens. As Fischer notes, one can argue that Lange's empathy for the mother and her children originated in her status as a female photographer, though not all of her photography "conformed to the transcendent ideal of mother and child." Regardless of its origin, this empathy is the driving force behind Lange's F.S.A. photography.

  But how much do we really know about Lange's intent? does the artist's intent matter? Does her intent have anything to do with art? If her intention was to help the sitters by exposing their struggle, why didn't they receive a penny, while the photograph generated fortunes? Was she helping people like Florence Thompson at all? Though all of the context revealed by Lange herself (and by Katherine McIntosh in the SFGate article) seems intrinsic to the interpretation of the photograph, I find myself constructing separate interpretations based on the formal and moving aspects of the image itself. Though I keep all of this context in mind (for example, after reading the article about McIntosh, I can only think of 80 year old Florence Thompson, dead in a red dress),  I always strip the sitters of their identities and focus on their universal humanity. In the end, this photograph is iconic. Why?

Formally, Migrant Mother is cropped, with no references to the surrounding pea farm or Lange's broken down and tire-less car. Once again, the faces of the children are obscured, so the viewer falls into the knotted facial expression of the woman, unmistakably a protective and considerate mother. Due to this decontextualization and anonymity, Lange's photograph seems timeless. Without contextual background, the image cannot be placed in history--instead, it can be applied universally, or re-appropriated for new contexts. Additionally, the intimacy of the shot is quite powerful. Once again, we (as in all of us) are pulled into the mother's expression. We closely observe the dirty necks of her children, and just feel. This is not a picture of individual people, this is an icon that reflects human suffering everywhere. And Lange's use of black and white photography makes us accept this transcendent truth without hesitation.

In the end, Stryker was accurate when he insists in an interview that Lange's masterpiece is "a great, great, great picture of the mother and child." And that is all.