How does Migrant Mother elucidate its Identity of family?
The subjects of Lange's photography were always nameless. Roy Stryker, a manager of the FSA's photographic project, had his photographers practice contemporary social science techniques in captioning their images. This allowed the subjects to be viewed as common men and women under unfortunate circumstances that the Roosevelt administration was trying to improve. Several decades after the photograph's publication, a journalist found the identity of the iconic photograph's mother – Florence Owens Thompson – discovering that she was born in 1903 on a Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. She married at the age of seventeen and had six children until her husband died in 1931. In 1933, she became pregnant again. Fearing that welfare authorities would take her child away, she moved back to Oklahoma. In 1934, her whole family moved out to Shafter, California where she worked in fields and began a relationship with James Hill. She had four more children with him. When Lange met Thompson, Hill and Thompson's sons were out looking to get their car fixed. In 1958, 22 years after the photograph had been published, Thompson saw Migrant Mother in a magazine and wrote to the magazine asking them to recall all unsold magazines to protect her and her family's rights. As the photograph was the creation of an employee of the federal government working in her official capacity, it belonged to the public domain and its publication was far beyond the reach of Lange's control. Once Thompson and her family came to know this, they withdrew their complaint and now speak positively about Lange.
Cherokee photography Shafter, California Oklahoma FSA Roy Stryker public domain Florence Owens Thompson