Object number1997.14
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California
Date1936
Artist
Dorothea Lange
(American, 1895-1965)
CultureAmerican
MediumGelatin silver print, printed c. 1950-1960
DimensionsImage: 9 1/4 x 7 3/8 in. (23.5 x 18.7 cm)
Sheet: 10 3/8 x 8 7/8 in. (26.4 x 22.5 cm)
Sheet: 10 3/8 x 8 7/8 in. (26.4 x 22.5 cm)
Credit LinePurchase, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund
On View
Not on viewPeriod20th c
Classification(s)
MarkingsOn verso, stamped lower center edge in ink: DOROTHEA LANGE
BibliographyLombino, Mary-Kay. Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College, 2019, p. 55;
John Szarkowski, Dorothea Lange (The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 25;
Therese Thau Heyman, Celebrating a Collection: The Work of Dorothea Lange (The Oakland Museum, 1978), p. 61;
Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime (Aperture, 1982), p. 77;
Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips, and John Szarkowski, Dorothea Lange: American Photographs (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994), pl. 1;
Keith F. Davis, The Photographs of Dorothea Lange (Kansas City, 1995), p. 45;
Peter Galassi, American Photography 1890-1965 (The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), p. 148;
Dorothea Lange: The Human Face (Aosta, 1998), p. 99;
Pierre Borhan, Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer (Boston, 2002), p. 133;
Mark Durden, Dorothea Lange 55 (New York, 2001), cover and unpaginated ProvenancePurchased from Lee Gallery, Winchester, MAVassar Exhibitions
Exhibition HistoryCamera Women, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, January 25 - March 24, 2002; Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, September 20 - December 15, 2019
Label TextThere is perhaps nothing more emblematic of our trust in photographs as instruments of truth than the twentieth-century traditions of photojournalism and documentary photography. As North Americans endured the hardships of industrialization, world wars, and the Great Depression, trusted photojournalists captured real experiences using subtle but powerful strategies of manipulation. Truth and artifice are thoroughly entangled in their photographs.
Working for Life magazine, Margaret Bourke-White intensified the emotional impact of her image in the aftermath of an earthquake by including a cluster of puppies in the foreground. Lewis Hine used the camera as a tool of social reform, photographing immigrants at Ellis Island and children working in factories. In 1911 he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to make images that were used to pass child labor laws. His photographs were strengthened—rather than undermined—by their familiar, compelling compositions, which encouraged viewers’ empathy. Hine’s Ellis Island Italian Madonna overtly borrowed the recognizable, emotionally evocative trope of the Madonna and child. Likewise appropriating religious iconography, Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer Dorothea Lange carefully cropped her photograph of a woman and children in a tripartite composition in one of the most famous (and infamously manipulated) photographs of the Great Depression. The woman was identified years later as Florence Owens Thompson, a Native American who felt that the details of her life were eclipsed by the power of the photograph as a symbol of the need for unprecedented levels of government social services.
DescriptionBlack and white image of a mother pictured from the chest up with her the fingertips of her right hand touching her lower cheek holding a child on her left side while another child leans into her right side and a baby lies in her lap. She squints slightly as she looks off into the distance, which furrows the lines in her face. Her and the children's clothes are tattered with wear in places.
Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge.
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