The original photo was staged and edited.

Migrant Mother

Migrant Mother is a photograph taken in 1936 in Nipomo, California, by American photographer Dorothea Lange during her time with the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration).

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Migrant Mother was achieved through a process of deliberate and careful intervention by Lange. Although she considered herself a documentary photographer and stuck to the belief that she should not intervene in the subject of her photography, Lange manipulated the framing and the subjects to arrive at her final shot. Furthermore the photo has been retouched after capture: the mother's left thumb was removed from the foreground on the right side of the image as Lange “considered the thumb to be such a glaring defect that she apparently didn’t have a second thought about removing it”.