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Lange's most iconic photograph, 'Migrant Mother,' captures Florence Owens Thompson and her children in Nipomo, California. This powerful image became a symbol of the Great Depression. The original photograph and its story are found in the Library of Congress digital collections.

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Dorothea Lange, photographer. Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California. 1936. U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Prints & Photographs Division.

The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Lange's "The Assignment I'll Never Forget: Migrant Mother," Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

The images were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4x5" film. It is not possible to determine on the basis of the negative numbers (which were assigned later at the Resettlement Administration) the order in which the photographs were taken. Extended captions and supplementary textual files relating to this series in the FSA Written Records have not been found.

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Research Guides: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" Photographs in the Farm Security Administration Collection: Introduction

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Discover more about an iconic image from the Farm Security Administration Collection. This guide discusses photographer Dorothea Lange's work, provides other views of Florence Owens Thompson (the Migrant Mother), and lists additional resources.

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The Oakland Museum holds the largest collection of Lange's personal archive, including field notes, letters, and photographs. Many of these materials have been digitized and are available for your research!

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Dorothea Lange Digital Archive | OMCA: Oakland Museum of CA

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Dorothea Lange Digital Archive | OMCA: Oakland Museum of CA - OMCA: Oakland Museum of California - Home

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Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority

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The online portal to the records held at the National Archives, and information about those records.

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Let's start our exploration of Dorothea Lange's remarkable life. Born in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange overcame childhood polio to become one of America's most important photographers. She studied photography in New York before moving to San Francisco, where she opened a successful portrait studio in 1919.

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In 1942, Lange was hired by the War Relocation Authority to photograph Japanese American internment camps. These haunting images document a difficult chapter in American history. The National Archives holds this important collection of her work.

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by Kerri Lawrence | National Archives News

WASHINGTON, February 16, 2017 - Dorothea Lange is widely considered one of the greatest documentary photographers of the 20th century. Her images of the Great Depression, taken while she was employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), are iconic.

Later, while working on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA) during World War II, Lange photographed the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans in camps. Her photos captured life in the internment camps and the often raw emotions displayed by the people who were uprooted from their homes and forced to live in the camps.

Unfortunately, a false claim has been circulating in publications and on the Internet for more than a decade that the government did not provide access for nearly 60 years to hundreds of these images.

For the 75th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which led to the creation of the camps, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration archivists are taking the opportunity to counter the incorrect information and set the record straight.

"Far from being neglected or disappearing, the images-especially Lange's-have been some of the best-known, most frequently requested and researched, and most frequently reproduced in National Archives Still Picture Branch holdings for many decades," said Nicholas Natanson, an archivist in the National Archives Still Picture Branch. "What's more, with the advent of the digital age, all of Lange's WRA photos have been available in scanned form on the National Archives website since 1998."

The erroneous information is based on a newspaper article from November 2006, in which a reporter interviewed the authors of a book on Lange's WRA work and asserted that the authors had discovered almost 800 new previously neglected images in the National Archives' holdings. Over the years, that story has lived on in articles and on social media.

"What is the case is that the bulk of Lange's WRA imagery was withheld from the public during World War II; that is, while the WRA was in operation, carrying out round-up, internment, resettlement activities that the Federal Government was obviously not anxious to publicize," Natanson said. "However, this withholding ended after the war."

In fact, Lange's photos were part of the WRA photo accession that the National Archives brought in from the Department of the Interior in June 1946. Included was the WRA central file-what the National Archives refers to as Record Group 210, Series G, comprising 7,870 prints and corresponding negatives, of which the Lange images are a fraction. As the accession dossier made clear, there were to be no restrictions on public use of the images.

"In any case, those are the basics of this unfortunate tale of a claimed historical discovery that really didn't unearth anything new. The photographs were there all along," Natanson said. "The story of Japanese internment was surely one of the darkest chapters in American history-but we shouldn't leave anyone with the impression that the visual documentation of that dark chapter was withheld from the American public for decades and decades after the War, or that the National Archives played a part in extending the darkness via neglect."

WRA photographs, including Dorothea Lange's collection of images, are available in our Still Pictures Branch at College Park, Maryland, or in the National Archives National Archives Catalog .

To mark the 75th anniversary, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum presents a special exhibition entitled Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II. Many of Lange's images, as well as those by other WRA photographers such as Clem Albers and Francis Stewart, plus some by a prominent non-WRA photographer, Ansel Adams (given permission by WRA to photograph at California's Manzanar Relocation Center in 1943) will be included. For more information, call (800) 337-8474 or visit www.fdrlibrary.org.

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Correcting the Record on Dorothea Lange's Japanese Internment Photos

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by Kerri Lawrence | National Archives News WASHINGTON, February 16, 2017 - Dorothea Lange is widely considered one of the greatest documentary photographers of the 20th century. Her images of the Great Depression, taken while she was employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), are iconic.

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Students, use this National Archives worksheet to analyze Lange's photographs in detail. This will help you develop critical thinking skills and better understand the historical context of her work. Stop by the library if you need help with this!

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Download the illustrated PDF version. (PDF) Español Meet the photo. What do you see? Is the photo black and white or color? Is there a caption? If so, what does the caption tell you? Observe its parts. Circle what you see in the photo. People Objects Both What are the people doing in the photo? What are the objects used for in the photo? Write two words that describe the photo. Try to make sense of it. Who do you think took this photo? Where do you think this photo was taken? List something that helps you prove where it was taken.

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Dorothea Lange." Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, Gale, 2024. Gale In Context: Biography,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1631003776/BIC?u=elginsdhigh&sid=bookmark-BIC&xid=8d762ce2. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

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To fully understand Lange's work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), explore these primary sources about the Great Depression from our Digital History database. Remember - context is key when studying historical photographs!

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Picturing America - Dorothea Lange | PBS LearningMedia

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In this video from Picturing America on Screen, cinematographer Dyanna Taylor shares her earliest childhood influence: her grandmother, the renowned photographer Dorothea Lange. Taylor travels to the Library of Congress to see her grandmother’s collection of photographs, including Migrant Mother, an iconic image of the 1930s. The photograph shows a poverty-stricken mother with her children and is best known for its emotional imagery and symbolic representation of Depression-era America.