Shared Space

SHARED SPACE The Joseph M. Cohen Collection

5

26

27

38

39

98

Pablo Picasso, Trois Femmes, 1938

99

118

Sculpture 119

131

132

156

Photography 157

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Dorothea Lange

166

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936

Reluctant icon

One of the most intriguing stories of the Depression is the saga of Florence Owens Thompson, Dorothea Lange’s most famous subject. The members of Mrs. Thompson’s family were

indeed immigrants in their own country. A full-blooded Cherokee Indian, Florence married her teenage love at seventeen and together they journeyed from Oklahoma to California.

Unfortunately, her husband died young, and she and her seven children continued to support themselves as “harvest gypsies” — California’s crop-pickers. They journeyed by car from harvest to harvest, but when the Depression came, finding work became difficult.

The influx of thousands of needy people made employment scarce. Nevertheless, she held her family together.

One fateful day, a “fancy lady with a limp,” as Florence later described her, asked for permission to photograph her. The woman did not inquire as to her name or history.

Frustrated at her inability to move to the next crop (her car was in need of repair) and disappointed that no money was offered by the photographer, she nevertheless acquiesced when told that the pictures might help gain aid for transient camps. The next day her image appeared on the cover of the local newspaper. Florence would not know until later that the “fancy lady” was Dorothea Lange, and that the picture taken that day would come to represent the best in American photo-documentation. Although Florence lived a full life, content in the knowledge that her children went on to better ones, she always resented her image as the beatific “Migrant Mother.” She was a survivor and did not want or need charity, perhaps evidencing a bit of her Cherokee independence.

Lange had captured Florence looking beyond the camera, her children clinging to her with their faces turned away. The image is profoundly enigmatic. Some see shame and despair, others see unhappiness and fatigue. Most, however, view it as the transcendent image of the Depression family. While registering hardship and pain, it clearly resonates with its subject’s

167

186

187