Her image of a Depression era migrant mother is one of the most iconic photos in American history and arguably Dorothea Lange’s most famous photograph. What’s lesser known is the story behind the image (more on that later) and all the ways in which Lange made her mark on America.
Born Dorothea Nutzhorn in New Jersey in 1895, a bout of polio at seven left her with a weakened right leg and a lifelong limp. It was, she said “the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me.” Furious with her father when her parents divorced a few years later, she took her mother’s maiden name Lange which she would use professionally for the rest of her life.
Lange studied photography at Columbia University and was apprenticed to several New York studios before deciding to travel the world with a friend. When the pair were robbed of their savings in San Francisco, Lange chose to make the Bay area her home. There she opened up a successful photography studio specializing in portraits of San Francisco’s society families. It’s also where she met her first husband, painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons.
Dixon was a painter who specialized in scenes from the west. On their travels Lange began photographing Native Americans. It led to her love for documentary photography. When migrants began descending on California in search of work during the Great Depression, Lange trained her camera on them. Those photos attracted the attention of the federal government’s Resettlement Program (later the Farm Security Administration) who officially hired her to document the crisis.
Around the same time Lange met Paul Schuster Taylor, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkley. Leaving their respective spouses, the pair married and travelled around the country documenting the devastating poverty and mistreatment of migrants and sharecroppers. It is during this period that Lange happened upon the woman in the photograph, taking just seven shots over ten minutes and then moving on.
What’s unusual about this photo is that Lange usually kept copious notes on the people, places and situations she encountered along the way. Her attention to detail provided as much invaluable information to the government as did her photos. Yet here, the only notation was: “Destitute pea pickers in California: a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.” It would take nearly 40 years for her subject’s identity to be revealed.
Florence Christie was a Native American born in Oklahoma in 1903. Just 17 when she married her first husband, they headed to California in search of work. When he died while she was pregnant with their sixth child (she would have 10 children in total) Christie worked the fields and whatever odd jobs she could find to support her family. After remarrying, the family was heading to work the lettuce fields when their car broke down near the pea pickers camp. As her husband went into town to see about repairs, Christie made camp. It is there that Lange happened upon them and snapped her seven shots. According to Christie, Lange promised the shots would never be published and Christie was bitter that she didn’t benefit from the photo’s success.
Under government contract, Lange didn’t benefit financially from the photo’s success either. Still, she garnered acclaim for her work and went on to become the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. During WWII she was hired by the War Relocation Authority to photograph the internment of Japanese Americans, documenting another painful period in our nation’s history.
After the war she co-founded the photography magazine Aperture and continued photographing society’s marginalized people before falling into ill health. She died of cancer in 1965. Among her posthumous honors is her 2006 induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Her groundbreaking photos, property of the US Government, can be viewed in the National Archives.