?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
DOROTHEA LANGE (1895-1965) Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (horizontal). March 1936; printed 1980s. Silver print, the image measuring 15½x19½ inches (39.4x49.5 cm.), the sheet slightly larger.
Provenance Bettmann Archive; gifted to the Present Owner, circa 1995
Migrant Mother's creation and subsequent transformation to cultural icon is well documented. Lange made this image, along with six other frames, of the same woman, Florence Owens Thompson, in 1936. Taken in early March, by the 11th of that month it had been reproduced to thousands of newspaper readers for the first time (in the San Francisco News accompanying an editorial titled "What Does the ‘New Deal' Mean to This Mother and Her Children?"). Since then, its power and visual impact has only grown and multiplied, becoming one of the most recognizable and reproduced images in the world. It has not lost its ability to move and connect, a testament to Lange's enduring empathy and abilities as a photographer. Here we offer a less frequently seen horizontal frame, printed in an unusually large format.
In February 1936 Lange's Farm Security Administration assignment required a month-long road trip in central California. She finished her work in Nipomo, a remote, rural region. On her long drive home she glimpsed a hand-lettered sign that read PEA-PICKERS CAMP, with an arrow. She continued to drive, in the rain, while her inner voice persisted. Decades later, Lange recounted the experience as providential: "I was on my way and barely saw a crude sign with a pointing arrow which flashed by at the side of the road, saying PEA-PICKERS CAMP. But out of the corner of my eye I did see it. I didn't want to stop and didn't. I didn't want to remember that I had seen it, so I drove on and ignored the summons. [. . .] Having well convinced myself for 20 miles that I could continue on, I did the opposite. Almost without realizing what I was doing I made a U-turn on the empty highway. I went back those 20 miles and turned off the highway at that sign, PEA-PICKERS CAMP." -- Dorothea Lange in an 1960 interview with Popular Photography
