Dorothea Lange

Swann Auction Galleries, New York, 18 October 2018, Sale 2489, Lot 149

Therese T. Heyman, Celebrating A Collection: The Work of Dorothea Lange (The Oakland Museum, 1978), p. 60

Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York, 1978), p. 212

Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime (Aperture, 1982), pp. 20-21

Dorothea Lange, The Human Face (Paris, 1998), p. 4

Therese T. Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips, and John Szarkowski, Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1995, pl. 42 (Mother with child at breast only)

Mark Durden, Dorothea Lange 55 (London, 2001), p. 37 (Mother with child at breast only)

Pierre Borhan, Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer (Boston, 2002), p. 190

In Focus: Dorothea Lange (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 31 (Mother with two children only)

Sarah Hermanson Meister, Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018), pp. 16-17

Looking Back: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography (San Francisco: Pier 24 Photography, 2019), p. 232 (these prints)

“Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, exists in more formats, prints, and places than (arguably) any other photograph in the world. In this regard it is, ironically, singular,” wrote the Museum of Modern Art’s Sarah Meister on this generation and career-defining image (Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother, pg. 2). While the world is most familiar with the tightly-cropped, front view of a mother and her children, these two variants further illustrate the conditions this family had to endure in a drought-affected pea farm in Nipomo, California. The publication of Migrant Mother on the March 11, 1936 issue of the San Francisco News led to the delivery of 20,000 pounds of food to the family and their community.