A Day In The Life
Relationships: Analysis Of Migrant Mother By Dorothea Lang
In March 1936, having just completed a month-long assignment for the Resettlement Administration, Lange was driving home through San Luis Obispo County when the crudely lettered sign of a migrant workers’ campsite caught her eye. Instinct rather than reason compelled her to stop. Laborers were leaving as she arrived, but just inside the camp, sheltered in a makeshift tent, she found a careworn woman with several unkempt children.
As Lange was later to learn, the family was immobilized: after days of eating nothing but frozen vegetables taken from the fields, they had sold the tyres from their car to buy food. In the space of ten minutes Lange photographed the squalid scene, moving closer to her subject with each exposure. The last was the close-up view of the woman with three children that we now know as Migrant Mother. Migrant Mother does not take in a single detail of the pea pickers’ camp,the bleak landscape and muddy ground, the tattered tents and dilapidated pickup trucks. Still, the photograph evokes the uncertainty and despair resulting from continual poverty.
The mother’s furrowed brow and deeply lined face make her look much older than she is. Her right hand touches the down-turned corner of her mouth in an unconscious gesture of anxiety. Her sleeve is tattered and her dress untidy. Evidently she has done all she can for her family and has nothing left to offer. The older children press against her body in a mute appeal for comfort, but she seems as oblivious to them as she does to Lange’s camera.
The morning after Lange visited the camp, she printed the photographs and took them to the San Francisco News. They were published as illustrations to an article recounting the plight of the destitute pea pickers, and the story was repeated in newspapers throughout the nation. For all its power and effectiveness as a documentary photograph, Migrant Mother endures as a work of art. With the mother at the center of a classically triangular composition and two small heads on either side, the image bears the iconic emotional.