One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

This famous portrait of Florence Owens Thompson was taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936. By any measures then and now, Lange was an extraordinary photographer. Born in 1895, she first worked for Arnold Genthe and studied with Clarence White at Columbia University. On a trip around the world started in 1918, she got as far as San Francisco and finding herself stranded, opened a photographic studio. She met Paul Taylor who would become her second husband and he hired her to document migratory workers in California.

In 1935 she began to work for the Resettlement Administration, which would later become the Farm Security Administration (FSA). She went to work for Roy Stryker and joined the company of Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Jack Delano, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Rothstein. Together they created an enormous photographic legacy for America before, during, and immediately after the Great Depression.

In this portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, Lange captured the essence of the depression and its cost in human burden. Lange documented many other great moments in her career, but "Migrant Mother" stands apart from all but a few others in telling the human story of a profound time in American history. Lange did not see photography as an art form, but as documenting the lives and conditions of the suffering and each of her images tells its own story. Her prints hang in many museums around the world. Dorothea Lange died in 1965.

Medium : 1 negative : nitrate

Created/Published : February, 1936

Creator : Dorothea Lange, photographer, 1895 - 1965

Frame : 1 12' Black sculpted, Size : 12" x 16", print size 6"x7"

Part of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) - Office of War Information (OWI) Collection housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

Price: $85.00

Availability: Usually ships in one week

Product #: FR0082