Florence Thompson
[Migrant mother, b. 1904, Oklahoma, d. 1983, Scotts Valley, California.]
That’s my picture hanging all over the world, but I can’t get a penny out of it. What good’s it doing me?
(Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother at 75 years of age living in a trailer park near where the famous photograph was taken and surviving on $331.60 monthly social security.)
I wish she [Dorothea Lange] hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did. (1978, on the 1936 photo of her titled Migrant Mother.)