ABSTRACT
Le Gray’s seascapes were widely exhibited and hailed by critics and fellow photographers in both France and England, and there was considerable demand for them in the growing market for art photographs. As an experienced professional photographer, Lange was anxious that the prints that represented her in exhibitions should be of a high quality. The thumbless version of Migrant Mother was the one that subsequently became the standard manifestation of this image, the one held today by most museums and published in most books representing Lange’s work. All prints are manipulations derived from the tonal information gathered on a negative. To match the complexity of entities like this, histories of photography are going to have to be similarly complex, self-consciously acknowledging and reflecting on this multiplicity of identities in one, a multiplicity that stems once again directly from the interaction of negatives and positives.
