Watsonville, California, USA
(Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress)
Florence Owens Thompson was only thirty-two in this picture, taken by Depression-era documentary photographer Dorothea Lange as an outtake from the session that generated the iconic ‘Migrant Mother’ collection.
Born in 1903 in what was then Indian Territory, now part of Oklahoma, Thompson’s parents were displaced Native American Cherokees. Marrying at seventeen, she and her husband began a family in California. When her husband died, Florence was left with six children at the age of twenty-eight. She went on to have four more children, three with a Californian man, Jim Hill.
When Dorothea Lange encountered the family, their car had broken down while they were journeying to find crop-picking work. Hill and the boys in the family had walked into town to get parts for the car.
‘She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.’
Dorothea Lange
