Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1950; the photographer's '1163 Euclid Avenue, Berkeley, California' stamp on the reverse, framed. 13 1/2 x 10 1/2 in. (34.3 x 26.7 cm.) sheet 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm.) Footnotes: Provenance Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2000 Literature Dorothea Lange (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 25 Dorothea Lange (New York: Aperture, 1981), p. 39 Dorothea Lange: Eloquent Witness (Chicago: Edwynn Houk Gallery, 1989), p. 37 Dorothea Lange: American Photographs (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994), pl. 43 Dorothea Lange: The Human Face (Paris, 1998), p. 99 Judith Keller, In Focus: Dorothea Lange, Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), pl. 13 Mark Durden, Dorothea Lange (London, 2006), p. 13 Dorothea Lange: The Crucial Years, 1930 - 1946 (Madrid, 2009), cover and p. 107 Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: Aperture Masters of Photography (New York: Aperture, 2014), p. 31 Sarah Hermanson Meister, Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018), cover and p. 3 Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019), p. 135 Note In February 1935, Dorothea Lange joined economist Paul Taylor's field team at California's State Emergency Relief Administration. On their first trip together, Lange photographed the desperate conditions of pea pickers at Nipomo, California. The illustrated report they submitted in March helped secure funding for the first federal migrant camps. A year later, in early March 1936, she returned to Nipomo, where a failed crop had left thousands stranded and hungry. Observing these conditions, Lange made a defining image of the twentieth century. By winter 1936, Lange was officially working for the Resettlement Administration and had spent weeks alone on the road. She was driving home in the rain when she passed a sign for a pea-pickers' camp. She continued driving for another twenty miles before turning back. Nearly twenty-five years later, she described the decision as one of instinct rather than reason: 'Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway. I went back those 20 miles and turned off the highway. [...] I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon.' (Dorothea Lange, 'The Assignment I'll Never Forget: Migrant Mother,' Popular Photography, February 1960). In ten minutes she made seven exposures, five of which she sent to Roy Stryker, chief of the agency's Historical Section in Washington. On March 10, the San Francisco News printed two images from Lange's sequence alongside a report on the starving migrant workers and their families. The next day, the paper ran the now-iconic image with an editorial urging support for federal migrant camps under the headline 'What Does the 'New Deal' Mean to This Mother and Her Children?' In what has become one of the most recognizable images in the history of photography, Florence Owens (later Thompson), just thirty-two years old, raises a hand to her chin and looks anxiously past the lens. Two of her daughters turn their faces into her shoulders, and an infant sleeps in her lap. Born to Cherokee parents in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, Owens had lived in California since 1926 and was only passing through the Nipomo camp at the time. She departed a few days after the image was made, never able to take advantage of the food which had been rushed to the camp in the wake of the article's publication. Lange's photograph circulated widely in the months that followed, appearing in the New York Times, Survey Graphic and U.S. Camera, among others. Lange never asked her subject's name, and Owens remained unidentified until 1978, when a reporter for the Modesto Bee contacted her. For the first time in more than forty years, Owens spoke publicly for the first time about her fraught relationship with the photograph. She wished Lange 'hadn't taken my picture,' complaining that she had never earned 'a penny' from it, and that the photographer had neither asked her name nor kept her promise that the image would not be published (Emmett Corrigan, ''Migrant Mother' Tells Story behind Famed Photo,' Modesto Bee, October 23, 1978). Throughout the end of her life, however, Thompson kept a framed copy of Migrant Mother on the wall of her Modesto trailer home. The legacy of Migrant Mother is inseparable from its status as public property. Since the photograph was taken by a federal employee, it has been in the public domain since 1936 and has been featured on everything from a 1998 postage stamp to novelty jigsaw puzzles. Additionally, other artists have similarly paid homage in a slew of formats, tweaks, and appropriations, thus attesting to the longevity and recognizability of the image. Prints made during Lange's lifetime are, by contrast, scarce. The RA/FSA's prints were small and quickly made, intended for distribution rather than display. Lange made her own larger prints of Migrant Mother sparingly and thoughtfully, of which the present lot is a beautiful example. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing