#5

When I heard we were studying poverty however many months ago, this image immediately came to my mind. I remember studying it in god's only knows when, probably eighth grade when learning not to assume when looking at photographs or jumping to conclusions. This shot was taken during the Great Depression by Dorothea Lange. Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. We've all seen this photograph and are familiar at the most basic level with what it stands for, and I thought it tied perfectly into everything we have discussed this year especially as a country we focus on being a world superpower to such an extent that we forget about internal and domestic issues.

This photo called "Migrant Mother" was of is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in early 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. 

On the moment of this photo, Lange explains it better than anyone ever could:
"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960)."

In March 1936, after picking beets, Thompson and her family were traveling in hopes to find work in the lettuce fields of the valley. On the road, the car timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers camp. They were shocked to find so many people camping there, as many as 3,500. A notice had been sent out for pickers, but the crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay. Florence would relate in an interview years later, that when she cooked food for her children that day, little children appeared from the pea picker's camp asking, "Can I have a bite?"

While Jim Hill, her husband, and two of Thompson's sons took the radiator, which had also been damaged, to town for repair, Thompson and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As Thompson waited, the photographer drove up and started taking photos of Florence and her family. Over 10 minutes she took 6 images.

Lange's field notes of the images read:

"Seven hungry children. Father is native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers’ camp … because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food."

Lange later wrote of the meeting:

"I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food."

It is just painted in her face, and the story behind her shows the devastation of poverty in the US.

                                                               Migrant Mother, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936