What message do you think the photographer was trying to convey? In the years to follow, the Thompson family kept their identities to themselves, but the photograph was a continual subject of conversation. While the focus of the book is on the lives of two women - the one featured in the photo and the one behind the lens - both during the time of the image and beyond, it also briefly details the effects of the Great Depression on families and the land. At what time of day might the photograph have been taken? The list might include reasons such as: to show others to know about the hardships, to document this time in history, to show America to see what was happening with farm workers, or to show people who were struggling economically that others were also struggling. The picture was made in 1939 in the Yakima Valley near Washington. At this point, people knew who she was, and a news article reported the fire.
An Analysis of Dorothea Lange's Photograph 'Migrant Mother'
Students interpret past events and issues within the context in which an event unfolded rather than solely in terms of present-day norms and values. A photographer needs to know how to analyze the scene, speak in words that language cannot, and reach to the souls of people through a picture. National Public Library, 21 Nov. Does the photo analysis include an accompanying visual that is relevant and supportive? Her role was as a documentary photographer, and her images also began to challenge the political forces in favor of and against the New Deal. By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of American democracy. Dix and the Establishment of the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum Prior to the Industrial Revolution, traditional institutions like the family, church, and local communities were charged with the care of orphaned children, the elderly, the indigent, and the mentally ill.
The photograph depicts a family suffering from extreme poverty, but it also demonstrates the determination of a mother to do her best to care for her children and to endure through difficult times. Are you looking up or down at the people in the image? There is no help, no protection, and nothing over the horizon but work, want and more wandering. Lange's work, not only in the Depression but also in the post-war years, is characteristic of a lost age when a broad swath of the mass media was profoundly concerned with social issues. In 1918, Lange decided to start a new chapter in her life when she moved to San Francisco. Then work back by showing the other frames and asking students to reflect back on what they already said, and what they see or do not see in the ensuing images.
Her goods are sold to the camps of soldiers. She died soon after her stroke. She suffered injustices--such as being fired from a beloved photography project although she produced, arguably, its greatest work; and experiencing the suppression of some of her most impassioned photography of protest, unpublished until forty years after her death. While touring the country on behalf of the agency, Lange came across a hungry and desperate mother and took several pictures of her, one of which would become known as Migrant Mother. With her children cowering behind her for protection, hiding their faces, the Migrant Mother gazes distractedly into the distance. I found the books a powerful way to introduce students to important issues.
Neither photography nor history simply reports facts. In 1935, Dorothea married Paul Schuster Taylor a Economic professor that taught at University of California. My mother is a very inspiring person; the reasons for this are countless. Some will argue, of course, that historians and documentarists have no business promoting their opinions, but that argument rests on the false assumption that it is possible to avoid doing so. Her 1920s San Francisco experience suggests that West Coast modernism, even in big cities, was significantly less urban than that in the East--or perhaps that New York's urbanity was only one model of city life.
Besides, if you take a camera out in this rain, you're just asking for trouble. As you browse through them, think of how they compare to Migrant Mother. Despite inclusion in a place or community, significant connections may not be developed. But what specifically makes the image of Migrant Mother so powerful and lasting? Five other images of Thompson taken by Lange Analysis So, what is it that makes this photograph so successful? You are now leaving the A rtsE dge website. Sixty-five miles an hour for seven hours would get me home to my family that night, and my eyes were glued to the wet and gleaming highway that stretched out ahead. Next Step Peer Revision Prompts for Photo Analysis 1. I cannot explain this reticence; I can only report that she was driven by interest in the outside world.
Her face is the lightest which makes her the first thing we see when looking at this image. One has to wonder if Dorothea viewed this picture from a psychoanalytic perspective, social or formal analysis when constructing the actual shot. Introduction Identifies the photographer and title of the photo, as well as thoroughly explaining why the analysis is being written for this particular photo. The story I tell is limited not only by the areas of my expertise but also by the available source material. All the pieces in the show are meant to evoke maternal or paternal feelings in the viewers, and when combined, the pieces are meant to show the journey. She was ambitious at a time when women weren't supposed to be, Gordon says.
The polio had left Lange with weakened right leg and a permanent limp. After the students have examined each photograph, place them in groups of three and have each group discuss and then decide on one picture that they would want the federal government to use. Two of the children are resting against their mother, leaning in toward each of her shoulders, so that the mother literally is supporting the weight of her children. She was not alone in this commitment, for she had predecessors and colleagues, and today has many photographic descendants. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. According to individual choice belonging can be accepted or refused.
Dorothea Lange: Drawing Beauty Out Of Desolation : NPR
Cameras were not new by this point, but they were still far from ubiquitous. Her second husband, Paul Schuster Taylor, a progressive academic reformer, appears at first to be the anti-Dixon: conventional in appearance, starchy in conversation. Knowing this adds an even greater depth to an understanding. The children at the pea-pickers camp in California may never have seen a camera. Katya Ozeryan When Gordon looks at Lange's face and studies it the way Lange herself might have, Gordon says, she sees her charisma. She learned to use it from her mother and grandmother, her early photographer employers, and from two master artistic observers, her husband, Maynard Dixon, and her close friend, photographer Imogen Cunningham. Her modesty, however, was also sometimes a pose, a coyness, a way of avoiding competition with other photographers who did call their work art.
