Exposé, migrant mother

MIGRANT MOTHER

Intro:

This black and white photograph was taken in 1936 by Dorothea Lange. It was originally called “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California”. This title was given by The Library of Congress. It has been retitled “Migrant Mother”. It is conserved at the Oakland Museum in California, in the United States of America. Its dimensions are 33.1 by 26 centimeters.

Dorothea Lange was born on the 26th of May 1895, in New Jersey, and died on the 11th of October 1965 in San Fransisco, California. She used to be a documentary photographer and photojournalist. She's famous for her work for the Farm Security Administration also known as FSA. Lange worked for the FSA from 1935 to 1939. FSA was a program during the great Depression whose aim was to fight against American rural poverty. Unfortunately, this program was a failure.

Lange studied photography at Columbia University in New York city. Her work on misery, especially on unemployed and homeless people, left a mark in the 20th century. Because of the economic crisis which happened in 1929 and started in New York, the rural world was extremely affected due to the “Dust Bowl” which was a long period of dryness. Most of the farmers were expelled and they went towards California. In march of 1936, the Thompson family who was composed of 7 children, tried to find a job around Watsonville but they were forced to stop in a pea pickers near Nipoma Mesa, the town where the photograph was taken. This photograph was actually unplanned, Dorothea Lange took 6 pictures of this family within ten minutes.

Our goal is to manage to answer the question:

Does this picture represent an american dream for all?

And to answer that question, we are going to first talk about the photograph in general, which mean the main character represented on this photo, the three children, the environment and how this photograph makes us feel. Then, we’ll add a little backstory of the photograph in which we’ll discuss about why is it famous, what it represented at this time and tell you some things you perhaps didn’t know about it. Starting with the study of the photograph :

Development:

This photograph was actually photoshopped. Indeed, on the original picture, there was florence’s thumb on the bottom left corner which was removed.On this photograph, we can see one woman, surrounded by 3 children including a baby that she's holding, whom we can assume are hers.This photograph has a triangle composition. The fact that there is a close up on the characters and everything around them is a blur highlights the main idea of the picture.

In the center of the frame, we can see a woman which is the main character of the photograph.The woman is Florence Owens Thompson, who is the subject of Dorothea Lange’s photo and so the migrant mother. She is wearing a damaged shirt underneath an arm ripped cardigan, we can say that she is dressed with rags. It shows that she is poor. She seems neglected, that is also the case with her hair, which looks dirty and oily. But the most important part remains her facial expression. Indeed, she is not looking into the camera, instead she is staring far away. Her look is lost. She's lost in her thoughts, the thought of making money for living, or taking care of her children, feeding them, keeping them alive... She is frowning, and she has marked features, for example, her forehead. Even though she is not smiling, she has strong laugh lines. The mother has loads of wrinkles, all of this makes her look older than she really is, since she is only 32. The misery has taken over her face even though there's nothing really miserable about her. She has a lot of dignity and we can see that by her posture, the fact that she's not crying or anything make us feel like

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