Who She Was, and Who Owned the Picture of Her

The woman in the photograph is named last, or never

Four photographs in this archive are famous for the face of a woman, and only one of the four carries her name. That one is the carte de visite of Sojourner Truth, and the name is there because Truth put it there and registered it. The photographer of the print we hold is recorded by the Smithsonian as unidentified, which is the point: the name on it is the sitter's doing, not the maker's. In the other three the woman reached the world unnamed, and the name was supplied later by somebody who had no part in making the picture, or has never been supplied at all.

This is not a coincidence of four cases. It is what the paperwork of documentary photography does. A caption is written by the photographer or the agency that commissioned the picture, for the purpose the picture was commissioned to serve, and a name is rarely part of that purpose. An anaemic little spinner makes the argument for a child labour law. A mother of seven at the age of thirty-two makes the argument for a federal relief camp. The individual woman is evidence, and evidence is described rather than introduced.

So the interesting question for an archive is not who these women were, which is usually recoverable, but who did the recovering, how long it took and what it changed. On this evidence the answer is consistent and unflattering. The name arrives decades late, from outside every institution that holds the picture, and it never carries any right over the picture with it.

Lange recorded the age and not the name

Dorothea Lange wrote down the age of the woman in Migrant Mother and did not write down her name.

Lange's own account of the encounter, published in Popular Photography in February 1960 and quoted at length by the Library of Congress in its research guide to the series, is explicit about it. She wrote that she made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction, and then: I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. The caption that has carried the picture for ninety years, and which is still the title of our record, is built from what she was told: destitute pea pickers in California, mother of seven children, age thirty-two, Nipomo, California.

The documentary record around the sitting is thinner than the picture's fame suggests. The Library of Congress states that extended captions and supplementary textual files for this series in the Farm Security Administration written records have not been found, and that the order in which the exposures were made cannot be determined from the negative numbers, because those numbers were assigned later at the Resettlement Administration. There is no paper naming her because no step in the process required one.

Forty-two years, and then a reporter came looking

Florence Owens Thompson was identified in 1978, forty-two years after the exposure, by Emmett Corrigan of the Modesto Bee, who tracked her to a trailer park outside Modesto, California, where she was seventy-five years old.

What the public then learned was a life the caption had no room for. She was born Florence Leona Christie in 1903 in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, and she was Cherokee. She married at seventeen. She was widowed at twenty-eight, pregnant with her sixth child, when her husband died of tuberculosis. Asked about the years the photograph stands for, she said: We just existed. Anyway, we lived. We survived, let's put it that way. Her children eventually bought her a house and she preferred to live in a trailer, because, she said, I need to have wheels under me.

What was promised that afternoon rests on Thompson alone. Her grievance, given in 1978, was three-part: her name was not asked, she was told the pictures would not be sold, and a promised print never came. Our record is careful about the status of that: it is her later recollection, unconfirmed and uncontradicted by any surviving record from Lange's side, because no such record exists. The Antiques Roadshow account adds a fourth version, that Lange had promised her name would never be published and that Thompson wanted this to spare her children embarrassment. None of these is incompatible with the others and none of them is documented. What is documented is Lange's own sentence that she did not ask. When she had a stroke in 1983 her children, unable to pay the hospital, used her identity as the Migrant Mother to raise about fifteen thousand dollars in donations. The Antiques Roadshow account says the money helped to defray her medical bills and that Thompson herself gained nothing, which is the flattest sentence anyone has written about the economics of this photograph.

A wrong name lasted ninety-five years and reached a postage stamp

The child in Lewis Hine's most reproduced mill photograph was printed as Addie Laird for ninety-five years, and her name was Addie Card.

How the error entered is itself disputed, and the piece cannot settle it. Elizabeth Winthrop writes that a child labour investigator named E. F. Brown listed her as Addie Laird. Joe Manning says Hine wrote it. Winthrop's later account in Smithsonian says only that somebody named her Addie Laird. Our own record reads the surviving caption, which carries Brown's name and the spelling Card, and concludes that the Laird form came in later, transcribed from period handwriting in the National Child Labor Committee's or the Library of Congress's own processing. Four accounts, and no field report that settles it. Hine's own note in his pocket notebook described her without naming her at all, as an anaemic little spinner in the North Pownal cotton mill. Even the month is unsettled: Winthrop puts the investigator's visit in February 1910, the Library of Congress dates the photograph August 1910, and no primary field report resolving it has been located. Laird is a Scottish name, most workers in New England mills of that period had been recruited from Canada, and Winthrop records that people in North Pownal were always puzzled by it.

In 1998, at the urging of North Pownal officials, the United States Postal Service issued the image as a stamp in its Celebrate the Century series, to commemorate child labour reform. Winthrop records that researchers at the Department of Labor admitted at that point that they could find no trace of an Addie Laird anywhere. The government printed a name its own researchers could not trace. The correction came in 2005 from a novelist who had written a book about the photograph and then went looking for the child: Winthrop found her on a 1910 census sheet, Bennington County, Vermont, roll 1612, page 111, sheet 12B, recorded on 4 May 1910 by an enumerator named George E. Corey, as Addie Card, twelve years old, living with her grandmother alongside her sister Anna, both of them spinners in the cotton factory. She married Edward Hatch, another spinner, on 23 February 1915. Both were seventeen.

One woman in this archive owned the picture of herself

Sojourner Truth registered a copyright in her own photographic image, and the claim entered the public record on 16 February 1864 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.

The mechanism she used is the precise and beautiful part. Photographs were not yet the category the statute protected, so the registration was made as an engraving, under the Act of 1802 that gave whoever designed, engraved, etched or worked a print the sole right of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending it for fourteen years from the recording of the title. The Copyright Office's own account quotes the court record: the title of an Engraving, the title whereof is in the words, towit, and then a picture of Sojourner Truth and the line I sell the Shadow to Support the Substance, Sojourner Truth. The caption is the title, the title is the property, and her name is inside it.

She was selling. She sat for portraits at least eleven times and charged twenty-five to fifty cents a card, at lectures and by post, to fund her work and, by 1863, the first Michigan Colored Infantry. The Copyright Office records her reflection that she used to be sold for other people's benefit, but now she sold herself for her own. A formerly enslaved woman who could not read had found the one filing that put a photograph of her body under her own control, at a date when no studio in the country would have volunteered it. Our own record is careful that the 1863 print it holds, NMAAHC 2012.46.11, carries neither the caption nor the copyright notice: the celebrated captioned cards are a related but separate group of objects, and the scholarship consulted for that record knows of no other sitter of the period, as against a studio, holding copyright in their own photographic image.

The third woman at the opera has no name in any source we reached

Weegee's The Critic, made at the Metropolitan Opera on the night of 22 November 1943, holds three women, and two of them are documented.

The two in furs and diamonds are Mrs George Washington Kavanaugh, born Marie Magdalena Muller, and Elizabeth Wharton Drexel, Lady Decies. They were named because they were rich, catalogued, painted and reported on, and their names come to us through the ordinary apparatus of recorded wealth. The woman on the right, whose expression is the reason anyone remembers the picture, is not identified in any source our record for it could reach, and the record declines to guess at a name rather than repeat an unconfirmed one.

She was also not a bystander. The encounter was arranged: Weegee had his assistant bring an intoxicated regular from a Bowery bar, ply her with wine and release her into the path of the arriving socialites on a signal. That staging is documented independently by the biographer Christopher Bonanos and by the curator Miles Barth, working from the testimony of Weegee's own assistant. So the photograph rests on a woman who was recruited, used, published and never named, while our record leaves both the whereabouts of the original negative and the picture's copyright status open. The picture is about a gap between wealth and poverty, and it reproduces that gap exactly in what it records about the three people in it.

Four pictures, four women and the right to reproduce each one

Set the four side by side and the pattern is a property pattern rather than a moral one.

The column that decides the others is the last one. Where the woman held the right, she was named immediately and by herself. Where the right was public, the picture could travel for decades with no name attached and nothing in the system was broken by that, because a public-domain photograph needs no rights-holder to be identified in order to be reproduced. Where the right is unresolved, the woman is still unnamed. In none of the three cases where she did not own the picture did any holding institution establish her name; in each of those cases it was done, or left undone, by somebody outside.

What to ask of a photograph of a woman

The useful questions about a documentary photograph of a woman are who wrote the caption, what the caption was for, and who owned the negative.

Those three answers predict almost everything else, including whether her name survives. They also mark where an archive can do real work. Naming a sitter is not a courtesy and it is not sentiment: it converts evidence back into a person, and it is checkable, from census sheets, marriage records, court filings and enumerators' handwriting. Winthrop found Addie Card because she read a census roll. A reporter found Florence Owens Thompson because he acted on a tip and recognised a face. Neither needed access no one else had.

Where it cannot be done, the honest entry is the empty one. Our record for The Critic says the third woman is not identified in any source it could reach and offers no candidate, which is worth more than a plausible name that later has to be withdrawn. The same discipline applies to what Lange and Thompson each said was promised in March 1936. Two accounts survive, they do not match, and the record says so.

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