Florence Owens Thompson

Florence Owens Thompson is the woman in Migrant Mother, was not asked her name when it was taken, and spent forty years unidentified while the photograph became the image of the Depression. She was born Florence Leona Christie on Cherokee land in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, married at seventeen, and was widowed in 1931 with five children and pregnant with a sixth. She followed the crops through California. In March 1936 Dorothea Lange found her at a pea-pickers' camp at Nipomo where the crop had frozen and there was no work; Lange made five or six exposures in about ten minutes, took no name, and left. The photograph ran within days, food was sent to the camp, and Thompson's family had already moved on and got none of it. She was identified publicly only in 1978, by a reporter, and said then that she wished Lange had not taken the picture, that she had been paid nothing for it, and that it had not helped her. She had ten children in all, worked in hospitals and bars, and her family raised money for her medical care in 1983 with an appeal that drew letters from thousands of strangers who knew the face. She is buried in Empire, California, under a stone calling her Migrant Mother. Lange s field notes recorded the family as having sold the tyres from their car to buy food, which Thompson s children later disputed. One of the daughters in the photograph gave interviews about it into the 2000s. The negative is in the Library of Congress and is free to reproduce, which is part of why the image spread as far as it did.

• Lived: 1903 CE – 1983 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other