From 1929 to 1939, the United States sank into the Great Depression, a period of extreme poverty and unemployment for most of the country. Read the passages that discuss a famous photograph, titled “Migrant Mother,” taken during that time. Then answer the questions that follow.
Passage 1
The following passage is from a book that examines how the photograph “Migrant Mother” came to be taken and why it was so significant.
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​Snapping an Iconic Photo
​by Don Nardo
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1  A driving rain was falling on California’s Highway 101 that March day in 1936. The driver, 40-year-old professional photographer Dorothea Lange, sat alone in the car. She later recalled what had been on her mind: “Sixty-five miles an hour for seven hours would get me home to my family that night, and my eyes were glued to the wet and gleaming highway that stretched out ahead.”
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2  Home for Lange was San Francisco, in northern California. She had just finished a monthlong picture-taking assignment in the southern part of the state. Working many days with little sleep had made her weary. So she could think of little else but her warm, dry house, her husband, and her young sons, Daniel and John. She had no inkling that in the next hour she would create a famous piece of history.
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​An Inner Argument
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3  As she drove along the nearly deserted road, Lange suddenly saw something interesting. Later she described it as “a crude sign with pointing arrow which flashed by at the side of the road.” In hand-written letters on the sign were the words “Pea-Pickers Camp.”
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4 She knew full well what those words meant. The U.S. economy was just beginning to recover from the Great Depression, a terrible worldwide economic downturn. But tens of millions of people in the United States were still out of work. Many jobless moved from place to place seeking temporary work picking fruit and vegetables—any opportunity to make a few dollars. The camp the sign mentioned, Lange realized, must be where local pea pickers had pitched their tents.
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5  Lange passed the sign and had no intention of stopping. But then she was torn by what she later described as “an inner argument.” Among the questions she asked herself were:
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6  “Dorothea, how about that camp back there? What is the situation back there?
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7 “Are you going back?
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​8  “Nobody could ask this of you, now could they?
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9  “To turn back certainly is not necessary. Haven’t you plenty of negatives* already on this subject? Isn’t this just one more of the same? Besides, if you take a camera out in this rain, you’re just asking for trouble. Now be reasonable, etc., etc., etc.”
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10 Lange drove on for about 20 miles (32 kilometers). All the while she kept making excuses for why she had no good reason to visit the pea pickers’ camp. Finally powerful curiosity overcame her excuses. She made a U-turn, drove back, and turned off the highway at the sign. At that point, she said later, “I was following instinct, not reason.” “As if Drawn by a Magnet”
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11  By the time Lange reached a cluster of small tents and makeshift shelters, the rain had tapered off. Almost immediately, a possible subject for her camera lens caught her eye. A woman and four children sat beneath a crude tent with one side open to the elements. They seemed to be doing their best to avoid the soggy, muddy ground.
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12 Lange parked her car and moved closer. “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet,” she later said. “I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her but I do remember she asked me no questions.” Lange took six photographs. Altogether the encounter lasted only about 10 minutes, she later estimated. As she worked, she asked the mother how old she was. The woman replied that she was 32. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed,” Lange later wrote. “There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her.”
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13  Having snapped the photos, Lange decided to leave. “I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers,” she remembered. “It was not necessary. I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment.” But although she knew the photos were good, she did not yet know just how good. Lange did not realize that one of the pictures would become iconic— perfectly capturing the spirit of the Great Depression. Photographer Michael Stones later described the timeless photo:
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​The iconic image is a close-up. Two of [the] children are behind [the mother] and back-on, leaving little doubt about who is the central figure. She looks away from the camera, her face thoughtful, worried, her body inclined toward the flimsy dwelling, a baby on her lap. Her right hand, placed prominently against the face, pulling down the corner of a lip, shows a delicacy of manner that contrasts with the dirt under its nails.
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14  These six heartrending images concisely and powerfully told a sad tale. They showed the plight of the mother and her children. But they also stood for something bigger. They captured the predicament that hundreds of thousands of migrant workers found themselves in. According to author and photographer Anne W. Spirn, “A photograph can embody a complete thought or an entire story. A series of photographs can shape a narrative or make an argument.”
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15  As she drove back toward Highway 101 that day, Lange may have realized that she had not asked for her subject’s name. In fact, she would never find out. When Lange died three decades later, neither she nor the American public knew the identity of the woman who had come to be called the Migrant Mother. 

Passage 2
Florence Thompson was the name of the real “Migrant Mother.” The following passage examines her life both before and after the famous photograph was taken.
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​The Story of the “Migrant Mother”
​by Ben Phelan
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1  As the United States sank into the Great Depression, a photographer named Dorothea Lange turned her attention away from studio and portrait work toward the suffering she was seeing around her. After taking a job as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency tasked with helping poor families relocate, Lange one day found herself in Nipomo, California, at a campsite full of out-of-work pea pickers. The crop had been destroyed by freezing rain; there was nothing to pick. Lange approached one of the idle pickers, a woman sitting in a tent, surrounded by her seven children, and asked if she could photograph them. From Lange’s notes:
​. . . I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that [she and her children] 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.
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2  Lange took six pictures. One of them, Migrant Mother, became the iconic photo of the Depression, and one of the most familiar images of the 20th century. With her children cowering behind her for protection, hiding their faces, the Migrant Mother gazes distractedly into the distance. At the time, the dust-blown interior of the United States was full of families like hers, whom poverty had forced off their land and into a life of wandering. Their poverty was total; they had nothing. Where is her husband, the children’s father? She is on her own. There is no help, no protection, and nothing over the horizon but work, want and more wandering. Her worried, vacant expression seems to communicate what we, at our end of history, already know: Things were not going to get better for a long, long time.
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​3  There are few images as deeply ingrained in the national consciousness as Migrant Mother. Yet for decades, no one knew what had become of this woman and her family. No one even knew her name: Lange never asked, and by the time the photo appeared in a local newspaper, the woman and her family had moved on to the next town.
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4  Finally, in 1978, a reporter from the Modesto Bee found the Migrant Mother, tracking her down to a trailer park outside Modesto, California. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson; she was 75 years old. Lange had promised Thompson that her name would never be published—Thompson wanted to spare her children the embarrassment—but once she was discovered, she revealed her name and told her story.
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5  Thompson was born Florence Leona Christie, a Cherokee, in a teepee in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, in 1903. She married at 17, then moved to California for farm- and millwork. When she was 28 years old and pregnant with her sixth child, her husband died of tuberculosis. Thereafter Thompson worked odd jobs of all kinds to keep her children fed. For most of the 1930s, she was an itinerant1 farmhand, picking whatever was in season.
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6  During cotton harvests, as she described in interviews, she would put her babies in bags and carry them along with her as she worked down the rows. She earned 50 cents per hundred pounds picked and says she “generally picked around 450, 500 [pounds a day]. I didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds.” For a while, she and her children lived under a bridge. “When Steinbeck2 wrote in The Grapes of Wrath about those people living under the bridge at Bakersfield—at one time we lived under that bridge. It was the same story. Didn’t even have a tent then, just a ratty old quilt.”
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7  One day in 1936, while driving from Los Angeles to Watsonville, Thompson’s car broke down. She managed to get the car towed into the Nipomo pea-pickers camp, had it repaired, and was just about to leave when Dorothea Lange appeared. Thompson was not eager to have her family photographed and exhibited as specimens of poverty, but there were people starving in that camp, one of Thompson’s daughters later recalled, and Lange convinced her that the image would educate the public about the plight of hardworking but poor people like herself. Within days, the photo was being published in papers across the country—an instant classic of American photography. In the years to follow, the Thompson family kept their identities to themselves, but the photograph was a continual subject of conversation. “It always stayed with her,” said Katherine Thompson McIntosh of her mother. “She always wanted a better life, you know.”
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8  Thompson moved to Modesto in 1945 and went to work in a hospital there. She had one of the most famous faces in the United States, yet, to keep her family together, she had to work 16 hours a day, seven days a week. “I worked in hospitals,” Thompson told NBC in 1979, “I tended bar, I worked in the field, so I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids.” Thompson profited nothing from Migrant Mother. “I can’t get a penny out of it,” she once said, but she wasn’t exactly bitter. She had posed for the photo to help others, not herself, yet the disparity between her high profile and low status couldn’t help but bother her.
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9 Meanwhile, Migrant Mother made Dorothea Lange’s reputation, helped earn her a Guggenheim fellowship, and conferred fame and a permanent place in the canon of American photographers. Lange certainly deserved her success; she had an eye, talent, training, and drive. Yet it seems unjust that Migrant Mother, one of the most successful photographs in American history, should have helped so many, but done nothing for the woman whose face and body were able to express so much. Thompson was a model; she was posing, and she knew why. She was to represent the very Figure of Poverty. So she organized her posture and set her expression just so for Lange’s camera. And that is a talent, too. Thompson and Lange, for an instant in 1936, were collaborators. Yet the gulf between their fortunes, already colossal, would only grow wider as years passed.
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10 The Thompson clan, which eventually grew to 10 children, worked their way into the middle class, but Florence Thompson never felt comfortable in a conventional home. Even after her children bought her a house, she chose to live in a trailer. “I need to have wheels under me,” she said.
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11  In 1983, Thompson had a stroke. Her children, unable to pay the hospital, used her identity as the Migrant Mother to raise $15,000 in donations. The money helped to defray Thompson’s medical bills, but Thompson herself gained nothing. She died soon after her stroke.
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12  A few years earlier, a reporter had asked Thompson about the life she eked out for her family. She spoke plainly, with no sentimentality. “We just existed,” she said. “Anyway, we lived. We survived, let’s put it that way.” During the Great Depression, that was never a guarantee. “We never had a lot,” said McIntosh, her daughter, “but she always made sure we had something. She didn’t eat sometimes, but she made sure us children ate.” ​
“The Story of the ‘Migrant Mother’” by Ben Phelan, from Antiques Roadshow, Season 18. Copyright © 1997–2017 by WGBH Educational Foundation. Reprinted by permission of WGBH Educational Foundation.
9
For this question, you will write a narrative response based on the passage(s). Write your response in the space provided below.
​Your writing should:
• Use characters, settings, events, and other details from the passage(s).
• Use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
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​Based on “Snapping an Iconic Photo” and “The Story of the ‘Migrant Mother,’” write a reflection on Florence Thompson from the perspective of one of her adult children, including the effect Thompson had on her children’s lives. Be sure to use what you know about the characters, settings, and events from both passages to develop your reflection.