Dorothea Lange Photograph, "Migrant Mother"
HOST: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has a spectacular collection of photographs that spans the life of the medium from 1839 to the present. ROADSHOW was eager to highlight a notable image from this extensive collection, but how to choose from over 10,000 works? With the help of appraiser Daile Kaplan, we focused on a notable 20th-century photographer whose work is now considered fine art. Daile, this is such an amazing collection, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about the photographer whose work we're looking at today.
APPRAISER: Dorothea Lange was one of the great photographers of the 20th century who's associated with a genre known as documentary photography. She started out as a portrait photographer. In the 1930s, she was one of several photographers invited to be part of the Farm Security Administration. This is an agency that sends photographers into the field to document the Dust Bowl, the effects of the Great Depression, and to bring a human face to a political issue that had polarized the country.
HOST: And this photograph that we're looking at today becomes the iconic image of the Great Depression.
APPRAISER: It certainly does. This photograph was shot in 1936 in Nipomo, California. It's a gelatin silver print. It's known as "Migrant Mother," sometimes also known as "Pea Pickers." The cold has frozen the crop, and the migrant workers are starving. We see a woman surrounded by her children, her infant in her lap. We recognize that something dire, something serious is happening to this family. It's a human story, and Lange, with her background as a portrait photographer, very successfully conveys a symbol that unifies the country. Dorothea Lange captures a number of images, takes these photographs to a local newspaper when she arrives home, and tells the story of what's happening in this camp, and immediately, relief is brought to these people. This woman was Florence Owens Thompson. In the 1970s, she was rediscovered and interestingly enough, she disputed a number of the facts that became part of the legend and story associated with this picture. But the important thing is she survived, and the grit and determination that she conveys in this picture was authentic.
HOST: This is so important as a documentary photograph, but how does it transcend and become considered fine art?
APPRAISER: With someone like Lange, there was always an aspiration to make art. She studied with Clarence White, who was a fine art photographer in New York, she was a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Grant, and she was among the community of photographers associated with Ansel Adams. A vintage print of "Migrant Mother" brought almost $250,000 more than ten years ago, so today we would expect that number to at least double. In the 1950s, 1960s, Lange revisits some of her older negatives. This negative had actually been damaged, and so there was a new negative from which she made prints of "Migrant Mother," and those photographs, which are called modern prints, can sell for anywhere from $40,000 to $200,000 at public auction.
HOST: I see. Thank you for all the information and history.
APPRAISER: Thank you, Mark.
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Kansas City, Hour 3 (2014)
Host Mark L. Walberg and appraiser Daile Kaplan discuss the photography of Dorothea Lange.
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