Analyzing Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother'

Catherine Angel’s Bessie and Nadine (2000) is a toned gelatin silver print on paper. The photographer, Catherine Angel, is currently a professor for the Department of Art at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, but most importantly, she is a mother. In fact, her daughters are the subjects shown in this photograph. Catherine Angel is experienced in Black and White Large Format Photography, Mixed Media Collage, Handmade Books and Color works. Her work has been exhibited in more than 400 exhibits. In this black and white photograph, Bessie and Nadine, there are two young girls of color are interlocked in fetal position within a dirt hole in the ground. There is grass on the rim of the photograph and a scarce amount of living plants around this

The migrant mother is in the foreground of the image, while her children are in the background of the image. The migrant mother is the major element in this image, while the children are the minor elements are the children. The mother is staring out in the distance, and appears to have a concerned expression on her face. She is worried, and her clothes are ragged. There are three children in this image: two of them near her shoulders, and another in her lap. It appears that the child in her lap is an infant, and was born somewhat recently.

Dorothea would be contacted by a professor who said that they had a grant from the state of California to investigate agricultural labor, and he wanted Visual support in the form of photographs. This would grow to become her most famous work. She traveled the dust bowl and California’s imperial valley, documenting through photographs and captions the life and daily struggles of migrant agricultural workers. Her photographs helped to raise funds for these workers and their families by being published in newspapers and requesting donations. Many of her photos were set up so the families would appear as in despair and desperate as possible. By doing this, it maximized the emotion felt by the photographs viewers. Dorothea Lange was one of the most influential people of the Great Depression, and her work helped to spur the America’s “war on poverty and

"Migrant Mother" has a much greater meaning to me than "Spiral Jetty", which is why I chose to preform a contextual analysis on it. This picture screams desperation and poverty to me. The artist feels sympathy for these less fortunate people, so she tries

Lange's narrative style accomplished its fullest expression in these years, particularly with photos like "Migrant Mother" becoming the main symbolism of what people had to endure during the Depression. Combined with her husband's composed documentation too, her photos were hailed as influential confirmation of the pressing obligation for government projects to help burdened

The focus of the painting is a woman in bright yellow. This woman stands above the crowd, showing only her back and a hunched figure. Her posture suggests that she is shy, self conscious and is afraid of the spotlight that she suddenly finds herself in. Her head is bowed which hides her face and deters us from seeing her identity. She looks as if she carries a great burden on her shoulders. She shares her pedestal with another woman in red who is smirking and confidently showing herself off. She, unlike the other woman, displays herself to be seen by all. She leans against the building behind her, her arm thrown to the side, which opens up her posture. Her confidence is worn as easily as her revealing

During the Great Depression Dorothea photographed unemployed men who wandered the streets. Lange had a large Graflex camera out on the street photographing people. In 1934, Dorothea held her first exhibition establishing her reputation and how far she has grown as a photographer. Lange married Paul Taylor in the 1930s, it was an unhealthy marriage. Dorothea Lange photographs an historic photo known as “Migrant Mother” captured what the Americans pain was like during that time period. Dorothea Lange captured unemployed homeless people ("Dorothea Lange.").

In the 1930’s, Dorothea Lange was a well-known photographer for the Farm Security Administration and had recently been assigned to photograph rural areas where federal programs had been implemented. On her way home from an assignment in March 1936, Lange decided to make a stop at a pea-picking camp in Nipomo Mesa, California and was immediately drawn to a woman and her children. That woman was a 32-year-old migrant crop picker named Florence Owens Thompson who recently had come to the camp with her seven children, hoping to find work. Lange, intrigued by the woman’s worn looks and curious about her life, asked Thompson if she could photograph her and her family. According to Lange, she took six pictures of Thompson and her children, and asked Thompson no questions other than her age. One of the photographs taken that day was ‘Migrant Mother,’ which quickly rose to popularity after Lange sent it to the San Francisco News to be

Lange used to pass by uninvolved giving her to act and understand the world around her. The visual representation of her photographs and captions were able to enlarge the understanding of the impact of the Great Depression while also providing a more democratic visual representation of the nation. This is because her work at the Resettlement Administration “was able to generate a public information in the form of visual images that revealed the many faces of poverty in a manner that had generally been acclaimed as unsurpassed documentary artistry.” (Gawthrop, 1993, p. 511) She believed the images were able to inspire the respect and open-mindedness, qualities necessary for the success of democracy. She wanted to bring about the questions to

A picture of a mother and her three children became one of the most recognizable photos in history. It came out of the Great Depression. In the black and white picture, a woman sits holding her infant, while resting her head in her right hand, with hopelessness displayed on her face. She has two older children leaning on her, their back facing the camera. Dorothea Lange, the photographer, worked for the federal government. Her assignment was to take photographs of rural poverty and capture the effects of it in her photographs. Migrant Mother did that. It was later discovered that the mother in the image is Florence Thompson, who died in 1983. The Migrant Mother image sparks numerous saddening feelings and dreary thoughts inside people due to

Consider then that while the physical subject of the piece has been identified as American, that is only the preliminary step in uncovering the image’s intended meaning; the actual ideological subject of the image lies not in any physical object but rather in the discussion that is created by the framing of those objects within “the entire system of significance that encompasses them.” The female subject merely

A woman stares of into the distance, resting her chin on her hand. Her face is careworn, worry lines etched deep on her brow, around her eyes. Her clothes, while not completely ruined, are threadbare and tatty. She seems to be sitting in some sort of ramshackle tent, made up of a few branches and a bolt of cloth. She holds a sleeping infant in her arms, and on each of her shoulders, two small children rest their heads. However, one thing seems to stand out the most in this scene; the expression on this mother’s face evokes feelings of exhaustion, unease, and fear or an uncertain future.

The first photo I chose from our reading is “Migrant Mother, 1936” taken by Dorothea

“A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?” So begins Susan Sontag's introductory essay to the book Women, a collection of photographs by Annie Leibovitz. Collected without a stated intention other than to treat on the subject matter at hand, Leibovitz’s images confront a wide spectrum of issues surrounding women living in America at the end of the twentieth century. Sontag explains, “Any

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother1 (1936) is a photograph of Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of Native American heritage, and it shows the life of a family who has no home. Grant Wood’s American Gothic2 (1930) is seen as a portrayal of American pioneering and the life of farmers. Finally, Michael Lensen’s Mining3 (1942) shows heavy labor within WWII. All of these pieces give a different message and it is all contingent on the environment that surrounds