July 20, 2020 Issue

Reading Andrea K. Scott’s absorbing “Goings On About Town” note on MoMA’s “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures,” in this week’s issue, in which she mentions Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” I was reminded of Jonathan Raban’s critique of that famous photo in his “American Pastoral” (The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2009; included in his 2010 collection Driving Home).

Raban suggests that “Migrant Mother” can be viewed as a form of pastoral – an idealization of the lives of poor people. He says,

The picture defines the form of pastoral as Empson meant it, and the closer one studies it, the more one’s made aware of just what a queer and puzzling business it is. A woman from the abyssal depths of the lower classes is plucked from obscurity by a female from the upper classes and endowed by her with extraordinary nobility and eloquence. It’s not the woman’s plight one sees at first so much as her arresting handsomeness: her prominent, rather patrician nose; her full lips, firmly set; the long and slender fingers of her right hand; the enigmatic depth of feeling in her eyes. Even after many viewings, it takes several moments for the rest of the picture to sink in: the pervasive dirt, the clothing gone to shreds and holes, the seams and furrows of worry on the woman’s face and forehead, the skin eruptions around her lips and chin, the swaddled, filthy baby on her lap. As one can see from the other five pictures in the six-shot series, Lange posed two older children, making them avert their faces from the camera and bury them in the shadows behind their mother, at once focusing our undistracted attention on her face and imprisoning her in her own maternity. It’s a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention, but both one’s first and last impressions are of the woman’s resilience, pride, and damaged beauty.

That last sentence is excellent. “Migrant Mother” is “a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention.” But I think Raban is wrong when he says that the woman’s dignity was “endowed” by Lange. I believe this migrant mother was inherently dignified. It’s her dignity in the midst of squalor that makes her portrait so arresting. Lange didn’t endow her dignity; she captured it.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936)