August 15, 2008 – 3:14 pm
Dorothea Lange 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 tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography.When the Great Depression began, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers.Lange’s best-known picture is titled “Migrant Mother”. The woman in the photo is Florence Thompson, but Lange apparently never knew her name.
In the sixties, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph: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. According to Thompson’s son, Lange got some details of this story wrong, but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.