Since its making in 1936, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, has become an enduring icon of 20^th century photography. Taken while Lange was working for the Farm Security Administration documenting the hardships of the Great Depression, it shows Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker camped alongside her children and other workers on a pea farm whose crops had frozen, eliminating the possibility of paid work. The photograph was reproduced widely in the press in the 1930s and in the decades to come, but it is just one of a series of five images Lange captured that day that helped to humanize the realities of the Great Depression. The others, including the photographs offered here as well as in lot 101, present a more comprehensive picture of the conditions in which Thompson and her family were living.

Tent Shelter, Migrant Agricultural Worker's Family, Nipomo, California was one of two images featured on the cover of The San Francisco News on 10 March 1936 under the headline Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squallor, the first article in a three-day series about pea pickers in Nipomo. The following day, Migrant Mother was published within the article, “What Does the ‘New Deal’ Mean to This Mother and Her Children.” The impact of the articles and Lange’s photographs cannot be overstated: soon after the articles were published, the United States government sent 20,000 pounds of food to the Nipomo camp, further underscoring the importance of photojournalism within American history.

The San Francisco News, 10 March 1936
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- Exhibited
  The Bitter Years: Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Photographs from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, 19 October 2022 – 29 April 2023; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, 8 September 2023 – 14 January 2024
- Literature
  The San Francisco News, "Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squallor," 10 March 1936, cover
  Becker, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, pl. 31
  Borhan, Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer, p. 190
  Partridge, Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange, p. 2