Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother)

March 1936

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Dimensions

34.1 × 26.8 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-624454

> The first publication of this renowned image occurred on March 11, 1936, on the third day that the *San Francisco News* ran a story about the pea pickers' camp in Nipomo. It was also featured as a full-page reproduction in the September 1936 issue of *Survey Graphic*, titled "Draggin'-Around People" and captioned "A blighted pea crop in California in 1935 left the pickers without work. This family sold their tent to get food." Also in this issue was an article by Paul Taylor, Dorothea Lange's husband, entitled "From the Ground Up." His report on demonstration projects of the New Deal's Resettlement Administration (RA) in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and California was illustrated with four more pictures by Lange. > > Since it was first published, this composition, best known as *Migrant Mother*, has come to represent not only the pictorial archive created by the RA/Farm Security Administration during the 1930s, but also the Great Depression itself. Posters and other publicity of later activists fighting racial, economic, and political oppression have borrowed from Lange's icon of the time. The handsome, androgynous face, the pose of stoic anxiety, and the encumbrance of three…