Florence Leona Christie was born on Sept. 1, 1903, on land we’d now call Oklahoma, to parents Jackson Christie and Mary Jane Cobb. At the time, it was Indian Territory and wouldn’t become a state for another four years. Both Jackson and Mary Jane claimed to be of Cherokee descent. Cherokee records confirmed Jackson’s bloodline while Mary Jane would later confess to having had white parents.
Regardless, Florence grew up in the city of Tahlequah, the capital of Cherokee Nation. “We have never been a race-blind country, frankly,” Sarah Meister, the New York City Museum of Modern Art’s photography curator, told a New York Times reporter in 2018. “I wish I could say that the response [to the “Migrant Mother” photo] would have been the same if everyone had been aware that she was Cherokee, but I don’t think that you can.”
Mary Jane and Jackson never had a very harmonious union. Brad Agnew for the Tahlequah Daily Pressreported, “That marriage was troubled from the start, and it was not strengthened when her husband was sentenced to three years in a federal penitentiary in Detroit, Mich., shortly after their wedding [in 1893]. They lived together no more than a few months, if his sworn testimony is accurate.”
The details of Florence’s childhood are, understandably, muddled. Her mother remarried in Florence’s youth to a man of Choctaw descent named Charles Akman. On Feb. 14, 1921, 17-year-old Florence married Cleo Owens, a 23-year-old farmer’s son. The children came quickly: The couple had three—Violet, Viola, Leroy—with another—Troy—on the way by 1925. The growing family relocated when Cleo got a job in an Oroville, Calif. sawmill. In 1931, when Florence was just 27, husband Cleo died of tuberculosis. By then, Florence had given birth to a fifth child, Ruby, and was pregnant with her sixth child, Katherine, when she suddenly found herself a widowed single mother.
It seems she returned to Oklahoma and the relative security of the Akman family for a time. Son Troy would tell Geoffrey Dunn for the San Luis Obispo’s New Times magazine in 2002 that Florence’s “biggest fear was that if she were to ask for help [from the government], then they would have reason to take her children away from her. That was her biggest fear all through her entire life.” When the dust storms began and the economy cratered, Florence—children, parents, aunts, uncles and all—left Oklahoma for California to find work.
Florence tended bar, worked in hospitals, picked cotton and peas. By all accounts, she did everything she could to make a living and feed her children. In the early 1930s, she met James Hill, a bartender. Together, they would have four more children, though one would die in infancy. In total, Florence carried 10 children.
In a 1992 interview, daughters Katherine and Norma shared stories of a mother who worked hard and “kept them clean.” Norma, who is the baby in Florence’s lap in the famous photo, said, “My dad was around then, but my mom was really the strong one. My mom made the decision—I shouldn’t say she made the decision because my dad—in those days the women didn’t make the decisions—but my mom was the one who went out and found the work.”
It was at this stage of Florence’s life that she sat in a lean-to on the roadside in Nipomo, Calif. when a photographer came by. Troy told Geoffrey, “I remember that day very clearly. ... We got the radiator fixed and hurried back to camp to fix the car. When we got there, Mama told us there had been this lady who had been taking pictures, but that’s all she told us, you know. It wasn’t a big deal to her at the time.”
Troy also countered Dorothea’s story about selling the tires. He said, “There’s no way we sold our tires, because we didn’t have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn’t have.”
They were shocked to see the images in the newspapers just days later. Daughter Katherine, who is on Florence’s right in the photo, said later, “Mother always said that Lange never asked her name or any questions, so what she wrote she must have got from the older kids or other people in the camp. ... She also told mother the negatives would never be published—that she was only going to use the photos to help out the people in the camp.”
(“These claims are dubious,” Linda pointed out because Dorothea didn’t technically own the images. They were, from the start, the property of the government that had hired her. Regardless, it’s very true that the immediate benefit of the photo never touched Florence or her children.)
“We were already long gone from Nipomo by the time any food was sent there,” Troy said of the money and relief sent to the camp after the picture went public. “That photo may well have saved some peoples’ lives, but I can tell you for certain, it didn’t save ours.” The family had left the roadside just hours after Dorothea and traveled on to California.
As the “Migrant Mother” photo spread and Dorothea’s images inspired The Grapes of Wrath film, Florence continued to take what jobs she could find. “My mom would get discouraged, but she never really gave up hope,” Norma said. “She left us with that legacy because we’ve always felt that things will get better, but you’re gonna have to work for it.”
The family would eventually settle in Modesto where Florence was hired at the new local hospital. “The first eight years I lived in this town, I worked 16 hours out of 24,” she later told an interviewer. “Eight-and-a-half years, seven days a week."
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In 1939, Dorothea and Paul published their photos and research in a book titled “An American Exodus: A record of human erosion in the thirties,” an impressive documentation of the Dust Bowl migration and the Great Depression. In the introduction, they wrote, “Our work has produced the book, but in the situations which we describe are living participants, who can speak. Many whom we met in the field vaguely regarded conversation with us as an opportunity to tell what they are up against to their government and to their countrymen. So far as possible we have let them speak to you face to face. Here we pass on what we have seen and learned from many miles of countryside of the shocks which are unsettling them.”
They then shared catches of conversations Dorothea had with the out-of-work and starving migrants whom she photographed. “Son to Father: ‘You didn’t know the world was so wide.’ Father to Son: ‘No, but I knew what I was goin’ to have for breakfast.” “When you gits down to your last bean your backbone and your navel shakes dice to see which gits it.” “A picture of me cain’t do no harm.” “Christ, I’ll die before I’ll say I’d bring up a bunch of kids living this way.” “I’ve wrote back that we’re well and such as that, but I never wrote that we live in a tent.” “Tain’t hardly fair. They holler that we ain’t citizens but their fruit would rot if we didn’t come.” “A human being has a right to stand like a tree has a right to stand.”
When World War II sparked that same year, Dorothea turned her attention to a new injustice in the United States: the internment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens, like Yuri Kochiyama and the family of Dorothy Toy. The U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command hired her to document the process, but would soon seek to censor the photographs she took.
“Dorothea was horrified by the government’s plan,” Elizabeth Partridge wrote in the book (stunningly illustrated by Lauren Tamaki) “Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal about the Japanese American Incarceration.” “The prisoners would be held without charges filed against them and without the right to a trial. That was illegal in the United States. But there was a war on, and Japanese Americans’ rights were suspended.”
As she was hired by the Army, all Dorothea’s photos were under the control of a Major Beasley, who had the power to “impound” and withhold Dorothea’s images. To this day, several prints with his scrawled “impounded” remain. In the introduction for “Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the censored images of Japanese American internment,” biographer Linda noted that, for this project, Dorothea had to “negotiate conflicting constraints. First, in the 1930s she had been working for a government committed to relieving suffering: now she was documenting a suffering created by the government.” She could no longer be candid with her subjects or her employers.
Elizabeth wrote, “Dorothea could have refused, but she was eager to take the job. She wanted her photographs to show what the government was doing was unfair and undemocratic.” The Japanese Americans seemed to have sensed her allegiances. “Whatever she photographed, Dorothea put layers of meaning in the image. A simple-looking photograph of a grandfather and grandson seems to ask a question: Why had the United States government locked up a very old man and a toddler? How were they a threat to our national security?” The grandfather in this image died in Manzanar Internment Camp.
“So why did they hire her if they were so nervous about a photographic record?” Linda wondered. “I have never been able to find any documentation explaining this decision, but my guess is that they though photographic record could protect against false allegations of mistreatment and violations of international law. They did not, apparently, register that such a record carried the risk of confirming allegations were true.”
“On the surface, it looked like a narrow job,” Dorothea said. “There was a sharp beginning to it, a sharp end; everything about it was highly concentrated. ... The deeper I got into it, the bigger it became.” She worked in a fury, expecting she might be fired from the task at any time. She called the internment “an example of what happens to us if we lose our heads.”
After the war, Dorothea, now 50 years old, accepted Ansel Adams offer of a teaching position at the San Francisco Art Institute (then called the California School of Fine Arts). She continued to travel and accept photo assignments, including series for Life magazine. In 1952, she co-founded (along with Ansel Adams and several other contemporary photographers) Aperture, an international quarterly photography magazine still operating to this day.
In 1952, Florence Owens married George B. Thompson. The family still lived in Modesto. In 1958, after seeing “Migrant Mother” in the magazine U.S. Camera, Florence wrote to the publication. She was not pleased. “You would do Dorothea Lange a great Favor by Sending me her address That I may Inform her that should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three Daughters shall be Forced to Protect our Rights,” she wrote.
This message did, in fact, reach Dorothea, and upset her greatly. But she had little control over the image. Linda noted, “She had earned no money from the image and could not control its use, so Florence Thompson had no grounds for a suit. But Thompson’s anger is understandable: She felt that she had been stereotyped as a Grapes of Wrath character, an Okie, and that she gained nothing from the photograph, and she assumed that Lange had profited handsomely.”
In the 1950s and early 60s, Dorothea spent significant time in the hospital. She struggled with the fatigue and muscle weakness of post-polio syndrome, which usually impacted polio survivors 30-40 years after the disease, according to the Mayo Clinic overview, as well as esophageal cancer. She maintained connection with sons Dan and John, though the relationships never healed fully from childhood harms, and took many photographs of her grandchildren.
“Dorothea spoke freely of dying, often in metaphorical terms but without self-dramatization or apparent despair,” Linda said. “Characteristically, she tried to control her dying as long as she could.” She even tried to arrange a vacation for Paul to take after her death. She managed to stay at home until her condition required hospitalization again on Oct. 8, 1965. “We’re licked,” she told Paul. She died on Oct. 11, 1965, at age 70.
On Nov. 4, 1979, The Modesto Bee published an article titled “A noted ‘working mother.’” Staff writer Emmett Corrigan had followed a tip and found the famous “Migrant Mother” living in a mobile home in Modesto. At age 76, she was still angry about the image, and sour about the state of the world. “Today’s women couldn’t make a living because she wouldn’t work as hard as I did,” she told Emmett. “I worked 16 to 18 hours a day during the Depression years. I weighed less than 100 pounds.”