On a chilly spring day in March 1936, two very different women met on the Nipomo Mesa.
They exchanged only a few words and did not learn each other’s names. The meeting lasted less than 10 minutes and they would never see each other again.
But out of this brief encounter would come one of the most famous photographs ever taken.
Photojournalist Dorothea Lange was on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, photographing the effect of the Great Depression on America’s poor.
As she drove north on Highway 101 she passed a sign reading “Nipomo Pea Picker’s Camp.”
At first she paid it little heed. But after traveling another 20 miles something told her to turn around and get a closer look at the people in that camp.
What she found were 2,000 cold, hungry and desperate people living in makeshift shacks, cars and ragged lean-tos.
There was no sanitation, no clean water, no medical services. Children were suffering from malnutrition.
They had come in hope of finding work picking peas, but the crop had been ruined by freezing rain.
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange recalled. “There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her.”
Lange was looking at 32-year old Florence Owens Thompson, a widow and mother of seven. She and her family had been seeking work in the Central Coast’s agricultural fields when their car broke down near the Nipomo Mesa.
They had no money. The only food they had were frozen peas taken from the nearby fields and wild birds they managed to catch and eat. Their only shelter from the elements was a tatterdemalion canvas lean-to.
The picture Lange took of Thompson epitomized the suffering of the Great Depression. As she looks past the camera, her two ragged children clinging to her and a baby in her lap, she holds one hand to her cheek in dismay.
As she contemplates a future that seems to offer nothing but more suffering, “the image transcends journalism and enters mythology,” in the words of social commentator Robert Coles.
Lange took several more pictures of the people in the pea picker’s camp and then went on her way.
She sent the photograph to the San Francisco News, which immediately published it. Soon it was seen all over the country, and later, the world.
The federal government sent 20,000 pounds of food to the Nipomo camp to help the hungry people there. The photograph helped garner support for New Deal relief programs.
Lange’s picture put a human face on the suffering of the poorest people in the country.
Rarely has one picture made such an impact. The New Yorker has called it “perhaps history’s most famous photograph.”
In the years to come the Migrant Mother’s fame spread beyond the United States. British historian A.J.P. Taylor described it as “The conscience of an age made visible.”
A British magazine called it “The Mona Lisa of the 1930s.” French writer and critic Roland Barthes said it was an example of photography creating a “mythic” emotional truth that transcends the immediate event.
Japanese critics have compared Thompson’s expression to the concept of Gaman — the ability to endure the unbearable with patience and dignity.
Lange went on to have a distinguished career as a documentary photographer. In 1942 she photographed the internment of the Japanese-Americans so poignantly that many were suppressed until the war ended.
In 2003, she was inducted in the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
The Migrant Mother made Lange famous, but no such fame awaited Thompson. Her family continued to struggle, and her children later recalled, “She didn’t eat sometimes, but she made sure us children ate.”
Life improved when the family settled in Modesto. Thompson remarried.
But for more than 40 years the identity of the Migrant Mother remained a mystery. Not until 1978 did the world learn that Thompson was indeed the face of the woman in one of the most famous pictures in the world.
The original Migrant Mother print and negatives are held by the Library of Congress. Reproductions can be seen in The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
In 1998, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp featuring the Migrant Mother. In 2006, Dorothea Lange Elementary School opened on the Nipomo Mesa.
The Migrant Mother is listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential images of all time.
Lange died in 1965 at the age of 70. Thompson lived until 1983, and when word of her struggle with cancer became known, people donated more than $35,000 to help defray her medical costs. She also received more than 2,000 letters from well-wishers.
Florence Owens Thompson may have lived a life of obscurity and hardship, but when she left this world, people knew who she was, “the Madonna of the dispossessed.”