Focus on this artwork and discuss the Execution.
Migrant Mother was achieved through a process of deliberate and careful intervention by Lange. Although she considered herself a documentary photographer and stuck to the belief that she should not intervene in the subject of her photography, Lange manipulated the framing and the subjects to arrive at her final shot. Furthermore the photo has been retouched after capture: the mother's left thumb was removed from the foreground on the right side of the image as Lange “considered the thumb to be such a glaring defect that she apparently didn’t have a second thought about removing it”. 
photoshoot, she writes, "I was on my way and barely saw a crude sign with pointing arrow which flashed by me at the side of the road saying Pea-Pickers Camp. But out of the corner of my eye I did see it... Having well convinced myself for twenty miles that I could continue on, I did the opposite. Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway". When Lange first arrived to the camp of migrant pea pickers, she took two snapshots of the mother's tent and her children. In the tent was the mother, her teenage daughter, and three young children. Realizing that these photographs lacked a central focus, Lange honed in on the mother and her children.Lange moved closer to the tent and took a third snapshot of just the mother and her baby asking the two young children at her side to move out of the frame. In this photograph the mother is breastfeeding her baby as she looks down. The mother looks tired and worn in her makeshift tent home. Despite capturing an intimate moment where a mother is nursing her child, Lange sensed a flaw in the photograph – the mother's gaze. The mother was looking downward, "... as if wishing to shield herself from the scrutiny of the camera". For Lange, this expression spoiled the image. She and her colleagues tried as best they could to present their subjects as dignified human beings in order to elicit sympathy rather than ridicule. Lange sensed that she was invading her subject's privacy and was causing discomfort so she moved on to her fourth shot to regain composure.In Lange's fourth photograph, she asks one of the children to enter the frame and to stand with her chin resting on her mother's shoulder. In this photograph, the mother is looking up into the distance with her daughter's head resting on her shoulder and her baby on her lap. The mother's expression in this photograph was now acceptable for Lange. She decided to take another but made some critical changes looking at what was captured in the background of the photograph.
Lange moved herself to the left and switched from her previously horizontal orientation to a vertical orientation of the frame. This allowed her to center the mother, the child, and the baby and left ample headroom for them. Additionally, moving left cut out the details in the background which she preferred not to show because of the possible implications that might sour viewers' image of her subjects. Lange took one last picture of the mother and her children, but this time she asked a second child to step in the frame. There were now a total of three children in the frame. The mother held her baby in her lap and her two children stood at her sides. In order to remove any possibility of competing gazes and any exchanges that might create unwanted effects, Lange asked both children to turn their backs towards the camera and place their hands on their mother's shoulders. Lange then moved closer to the mother, focusing her at the center of the frame and excluding any other background such that the mother and her children were the only objects in the frame. This last photograph is now known as Migrant Mother. According to Lange, she was only at the camp for ten minutes. After her last shot she finally closed her camera and went home.
photography pea pickers