text: Lange's field notes for the Resettlement Administration were typically very thorough, but on this particular day she had been rushing to get home after a month on assignment, and the notes she submitted with this batch of negatives do not refer to any of the seven photographs she took of Thompson and her family. It seems that the published newspaper reports about this camp were later distilled into captions for the series, which explains inaccuracies on the file cards in the Library of Congress. For example, one of the file cards reads:
  Twenty-three years later, Lange wrote of the encounter with Thompson:
  Troy Owens, one of Thompson's sons, recounted:
  In many ways, Migrant Mother is not typical of Lange's careful method of interacting with her subject. Exhausted after a long road-trip, she did not speak extensively to the migrant woman, or Thompson herself, and may not have recorded any notes.
  According to Thompson, Lange promised the photos would never be published. Lange, however, sent them to the San Francisco News before even sending them to the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. The San Francisco News ran the pictures almost immediately and reported that 2,500 to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in Nipomo, California. Within days, the pea-picker camp received  of food from the federal government. Thompson and her family had moved on by the time the food arrived, and were working near Watsonville, California.