# Who She Was, and Who Owned the Picture of Her > Four famous photographs of women in this archive. Only one of the four is named on the picture, by herself, and she is the only one who owned the right to reproduce it. > The Study - 2026-09-25 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/who-she-was-and-who-owned-the-picture/ ## Key points - Of the four most reproduced photographs of women in this archive, the maker named the woman in one of them. In that one case the woman named herself, in a caption she registered as her own property. - The name of the woman in a documentary photograph is usually established by an outsider with no stake in the picture, long after the fact: a reporter on the Modesto Bee in 1978, and a novelist reading a 1910 census sheet in 2005. - The wrong name can outlive the right one and acquire federal authority on the way. Addie Card was printed as Addie Laird from an investigator's note of February 1910 until 2005, and the United States Postal Service put the error on a stamp in 1998. - Naming follows property. Sojourner Truth entered a copyright in her own name on 16 February 1864 and controlled her image; Lange's negative was public property from the instant of exposure because she was a salaried federal employee, so Florence Owens Thompson could never control or profit from the most reproduced photograph of the Depression. - One of the four women has no name in any source this archive could reach, and our record for the picture declines to supply one rather than repeat an unconfirmed guess. ## The woman in the photograph is named last, or never ## Lange recorded the age and not the name ## Forty-two years, and then a reporter came looking ## A wrong name lasted ninety-five years and reached a postage stamp ## One woman in this archive owned the picture of herself ## The third woman at the opera has no name in any source we reached ## Four pictures, four women and the right to reproduce each one ## What to ask of a photograph of a woman ## Why this archive is free to read In this archive the woman who owned the picture of herself was named in it, and the three women who did not own the picture of themselves were named late, wrongly or not at all. Sojourner Truth entered a copyright on 16 February 1864 and put her name in the registered title. Florence Owens Thompson waited forty-two years for a reporter. Addie Card waited ninety-five for a novelist with a census roll, and spent seven of those years on a United States postage stamp under a name that was never hers. The woman at the right of The Critic is still waiting. Naming her is not a gesture of respect owed to the past. It is the ordinary work of establishing who is in a document, and on this evidence the institutions that hold these pictures have almost never been the ones to do it. ## Questions **Who was the woman in Migrant Mother?** Florence Owens Thompson, born Florence Leona Christie in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, in 1903, and Cherokee. She was identified in 1978, forty-two years after Dorothea Lange photographed her at a pea pickers' camp near Nipomo, California, by a reporter from the Modesto Bee who tracked her to a trailer park outside Modesto. **Did Dorothea Lange know the name of the woman she photographed?** No. In her own account of the encounter, published in Popular Photography in February 1960 and quoted by the Library of Congress, Lange wrote that she did not ask her name or her history, and that the woman told her only her age, thirty-two. **Why was the girl in Lewis Hine's mill photograph called Addie Laird?** Nobody can say for certain. Elizabeth Winthrop writes that a child labour investigator named E. F. Brown listed her that way; Joe Manning says Hine wrote it; our own record reads the surviving caption, which carries Brown's name and the spelling Card, and concludes the Laird form was introduced later in archival transcription. The name stood until 2005, when Winthrop found her as Addie Card on a 1910 census sheet for Bennington County, Vermont. The United States Postal Service had already issued the image as a stamp in 1998 under the wrong name. **Did any of these women own the photograph of herself?** One did. Sojourner Truth registered a copyright claim in her own photographic image, entered on 16 February 1864 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, filed as an engraving because the statute of 1802 protected prints rather than photographs. She sold the cards at twenty-five to fifty cents to fund her work. **Why is the third woman in Weegee's The Critic still unnamed?** No source this archive could reach identifies her. She was recruited from a Bowery bar by Weegee's assistant for a staged encounter, documented independently by the biographer Christopher Bonanos and the curator Miles Barth, and our record for the photograph declines to supply a name rather than repeat an unconfirmed one. ## Sources - [1] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, research guide, Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" Photographs in the Farm Security Administration Collection, Introduction, quoting Lange's account in Popular Photography, February 1960, and stating that extended captions and supplementary textual files for the series have not been found. - [2] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, item record for Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California, digital file fsa.8b29516. - [3] Antiques Roadshow, WGBH, The Story of the "Migrant Mother", for the 1978 identification by a Modesto Bee reporter, Thompson's birth as Florence Leona Christie in Indian Territory in 1903, her own words, and the 1983 appeal that raised about fifteen thousand dollars towards her hospital bills. - [4] Marilyn Creswell, Librarian-in-Residence, United States Copyright Office, "Sojourner Truth and the Power of Copyright Registration", Copyright: Creativity at Work, 8 December 2020, quoting the court record of the deposit and giving the date the copyright entered the public record as 16 February 1864. Read in the Internet Archive capture of 17 December 2025 after blogs.loc.gov returned HTTP 403 to a direct request. - [5] National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, object record for the Carte-de-visite of Sojourner Truth, 2012.46.11, the 1863 print held without caption or copyright notice. - [6] Elizabeth Winthrop, "Searching for Addie: The Story behind a Famous Photograph", Social Education 70, no. 4 (2006), 174-177, for E. F. Brown's February 1910 note naming her Addie Laird, the 1998 Celebrate the Century stamp issued at the urging of North Pownal officials, the Department of Labor's inability to trace the name, and the 1910 census sheet, roll 1612, page 111, sheet 12B, recorded 4 May 1910 by George E. Corey. - [7] Joe Manning, "Addie Card: The Search for an Anemic Little Spinner", Historical Journal of Massachusetts 36, no. 2 (2008), for the documented later life traced after the identification. - [8] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, item record for Hine's Photo No. 1056, Addie Card, spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill. - [9] International Center of Photography, collection object record for Weegee, The Critic, accession 7229.1993, one of the institutional holdings of the print. - [10] Elizabeth Winthrop, "Through the Mill", Smithsonian Magazine, September 2006, on the search for the child in Hine's photograph.