<strong>Sometimes photographs tell the wrong story...</strong>

[caption id="attachment_2137" align="alignright" width="230" caption="Dorthea Lange&#39;s &quot;Migrant Mother.&quot; Source: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.htm"]<a href="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/migrant-mother1.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-2137" src="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/migrant-mother1-230x300.jpg" alt="" width="230" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

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Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) was an influential American documentary photojournalist and photographer that was well-known for her work for the Farm Security Administration, during and after the Great Depression. Lange snapped her most renowned photograph, “Migrant Mother,” in March of 1936, while she was in Nipomo, California, a rural town 175 miles from Los Angeles. This iconic photograph requires preservation because it is an example of how a single photograph brings about lasting social and political change, regardless of whether the story behind the image is true.

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The famed photograph was part of five shots taken on that cold and damp day along the edges of a pea field in California [Street]. Lange was a famous portrait photographer and had owned a successful photography business. She was fortunate to live rather comfortably doing what she loved. Well, rather comfortably until the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 when it became impossible for most people to afford to have professional portraits taken [Street].

The Great Depression affected her financially and emotionally, on a deep level. She took her camera from her comfortable studio to the street, or to the fields, in this case. Her task was to preserve the social and historical ramifications of the Great Depression [Becker-Ohrn].  She set out to photograph that segment of the population hit the hardest by the economic crisis. She trekked deep in to the farmlands of California, carrying her camera, numerous canisters of black and white film and a talent for blending in with the environment. Her mission was to capture the human condition at its most natural, vulnerable, raw and unaware[Becker-Ohrn]. “Migrant Mother” is a perfect example Lange’s ability to capture emotion and desperation in a black and white image. She chose her subjects for their realistic quality and for their ability to tell a story without words [Golden]. These were often worn-out, disappointed, bewildered and beleaguered faces. She specialized in displaying their sullen and desolate lives [Golden]. Her photos showed the plight of our country’s largest segment of people and she was just doing her job [Meltzer]. Or, was she? Could the motive have been about something different?

In 1936, U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt had won re-election by a landslide, even though the Great Depression was in its eighth year. Roosevelt had instituted several programs that were favored by the American people, including the Social Security Act and unemployment benefits [Becker-Ohrn]. His goal was to consolidate the economy and focus on agriculture and industry. One of the outcomes of this giant push toward relief for the U.S. citizenry was a state-controlled relief program called The Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration. The name changed to the "Farm Security Administration" (FSA) in 1937 [Becker-Ohrn]. Roosevelt appointed Ron Stryker to head the organization and gave him the task of documenting the disastrous living conditions in agricultural areas among rural America. Many famous photographers worked for Stryker, including Lange (who joined his group in 1935). In total, the FSA produced about 170,000 negatives and 70,000 original prints to document the era. Today, much of what we know about the Great Depression is based on the FSA photographs [Becker-Ohrn].

After working for Stryker for a year or two, Lange began to realize that strong political ambitions were surrounding the FSA and that these ambitions had to do with the "New Deal," proposed by President Roosevelt [Shindo]. Lange began to see that the FSA was exploiting the privacy of the poor and unfortunate in an effort to propagandize the New Deal. The details here are a bit foggy, perhaps purposefully so, but Lange and her husband saw this situation as an opportunity to further their own interests [Street].

Lange married Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1935. Taylor was a left-wing labor economist and the blatant propaganda created by his wife's photos placed him in good favor with certain political camps [Meltzer]. Some say that his connection to the Roosevelt administration was unusually close and that he benefited immensely (in a financial and professional sense) from the photos. After they married, Taylor groomed Lange politically and educated her in the areas of social and political protocol. As a team, they spent five years documenting extreme poverty and the blatant exploitation of migrant workers and sharecroppers. Primarily, Lange took the photographs as documentation of their claims and Taylor assembled economic, demographic and migratory data that was used for reporting to the Roosevelt Administration [Meltzer].

Roosevelt implemented a propaganda machine that cranked out all sorts of information. The news media was in its infancy in the mid-1930s. There were no 24-hour news broadcasts and what information was relayed to the country was relayed on purpose. In fact, Lange's FSA photographs were not the only means of getting the word out about the amazing benefits of the New Deal. Lange's black and white "Migrant Mother" has the same look and feel of the painting (commissioned by Stryker) that was turned in to a Resettlement Administration poster by Bernarda Bryson Shahn.

[caption id="attachment_2139" align="alignleft" width="196" caption="Shahn&#39;s &quot;A Mule and a Plow&quot; Source: : http://www.michenermuseum.org/exhibits/bryson.php"]<a href="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/shahn.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-2139" src="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/shahn-196x300.jpg" alt="" width="196" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

Shahn painted a disheveled and exhausted, ethnic (non-white) man dressed in threadbare and dusty clothing, leaning on a dilapidated fence in front of a ramshackle farmhouse, just next to his noticeably weak mule. The only text on this painting is, "A Mule and a Plow. Resettlement Administration. Small Loans Give Farmers a New Start." This painting was commissioned by Stryker to tell a political story. Stryker could request that the content be about anything so he chose to create a mood with which middle-class America could identify. The text chosen was no coincidence and the words "New Start" were used for a specific reason [Fox]. Both Lange and Shahn's work depict the down-trodden, dissatisfied and deflated people that the New Deal was supposed to be helping. Both works showed just how bad it could be for middle-class America. The similarities are almost endless, including the clothing, colors, forlorn facial expressions, farm setting, and general feel of desperation. Basically, all one would need to do would be to place the same text on Lange's photograph and the exact same message would come across.

Lange's image is a black and white photograph of a real, live mother "of seven children" and she is desperate to provide a better life for her children [Golden]. Shahn's painting is nearly all black and white (even though a plethora of color paints were available at the time) and shows a man who is obviously disappointed that he cannot provide better for his family. Both images show how deeply the economic crisis is and how hopeless it seems to both men and women. More importantly, both images were purposefully used to illustrate how bad the living conditions were and this opened the door to the discussion of the benefits of the New Deal. Much of the artwork during that time was depressing and showed the immense suffering of our people. These two examples just happened to be among the many that were used to further political agendas.

Out of the five photographs taken that day in Nipomo, "Migrant Mother" became the most well-known. The reason could be the composition of the photo, the way the light falls on the mother's face, the fact that three bashful or ashamed children are shown in the frame, the amount of tent showing along the edges of the frame, or any number of things. The predominant fact is that this was one of the first photographs that was used for political propaganda and it set the definition of the word "documentary" to this type of image. This was not a pretty image. It was not a lush landscape with waterfalls, weeping willow trees and a family of rabbits in a picturesque meadow. This was unrefined and organic. The raw image exposed the dark underbelly of our land and its people during the Great Depression. The United States was the Golden Child of the World and in the wake of the Great Depression, the true depiction of our country was coming out for all to see. Lange's photograph was innovative because it did not sugarcoat anything about what our people were going through during those hopeless financial times. Regardless if whether it was used to further a political agenda or not, it was a real-life image of a real family and it created an impact that we still talk about today.

When Lange contacted an editor at a San Francisco newspaper, after developing the string of five images she took that day, the editor informed some federal authorities and subsequently published an article featuring two of Lange's photos. As a direct result of the article and the call to the authorities, a load of food (20,000 pounds) was delivered to the camp where Lange shot the photographs. The impact of this photo would become even greater when author, John Steinbeck used the details of the article and photo to create the fictional story behind his famed novel, "The Grapes of Wrath" [Shindo].

Today, Lange's image of the woman, named Florence Owen Thompson (1903-1983), known as the Migrant Mother, has been reprinted more than a million times. The image of this mother of seven has appeared on U.S. stamps, t-shirts, Mother's Day cards, books, posters, and many other venues. The face of Ms. Thompson has become known as the face of the New Deal. She represented the group of New Deal loyalists that wanted to focus the light on the depraved capitalist system against which President Roosevelt was so adamantly fighting. They were successful and this image is well-known because it created a certain emotional feel that reminds us all of how bad our lives <em>could be</em>. The New Deal was a social program that was sold to the America based on propaganda and emotion. It created some amazing programs that are still in existence today and benefits for Americans. I agree with the premise and tenets of the New Deal. However, I do not believe that the emotional feel created by this photo was reality. But then again, photos are very rarely true reality.

Personally, I find that the image is a striking reminder that what we see is not always what we get, or what is true reality. The true facts behind the photo were hidden and covered up for decades. For instance, after many years passed and many interviews were conducted, the discovery was made that Ms. Thompson was not a sharecropper. Nor was she a migrant farm worker. Neither was her husband. She was not a single mother with seven children and she had not sold her tent and car for food. She had not been living off birds that her children had killed and she has not even a pea picker[Shindo].

Upon further investigation, it was determined that Ms. Thompson was simply sitting along the side of the road with three children, waiting for her husband and sons to return from town. Soon after Lange left the scene where the infamous photo was taken, Thompson's husband returned with a fixed radiator, installed it, started the car and drove to the next town to start

working. Most significant of all, Ms. Thompson and her family never received a single bite of the food that was delivered to the camp in the week following the published article. In fact, Ms. Thompson had been living in California for ten years, in her own house, and her husband had been working in mills for years [Shindo].

Today, we live in the age of technology. We have video tape, editing software, and lightening fast delivery of the "facts." The biggest lesson to take away from these amazing photographs is that it is always best to be skeptical of everything you hear and see. Take the time to investigate, to question and to determine your own impressions and feelings about life events. That advice is especially true regarding all things political. Just because the New Deal sought to better the lives of the middle-class, it was not okay to use falsities to create a platform for their agenda. Preserve this image forever to remind us all that life is fragile and we must research the facts and make our own decisions about what to believe.

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<strong>Works Cited:</strong>

<strong>Becker-Ohrn</strong>, Karin.  <em>Dorthea Lange: The Documentary Tradition</em>.  Baton Rouge: Lousians State University Press, 1980. This is a college-level textbook that I used to research President Roosevelt, The New Deal, and the political propagandists that were prevalent in 1936. I also researched Farm Settlement Administration fieldwork and the number of images and negatives taken by Stryker's photographers.

<strong>Fiero</strong>, Gloria. <em>The Humanist Tradition</em>, Volume Two, Chapter 34, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2011. Accessed online version, pages unknown; Date accessed November 11-13,2011. This is a college-level course textbook that I used to learn about how Dorthea Lange's work left a documentary record of rural poverty and oppression during the Great Depression.

<strong>Fox</strong>, Margalit. <em>Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Painter, Dies at 101</em>.  Published December 16, 2004.  Accessed: November 10, 2011. I used this page to research painter Shahn. &lt;http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/arts/16shahn.html&gt;.

<strong>Golden</strong>, Reuel.  <em>Photo-journalism: 1855 to the present</em>.  New York: Abbeville Press, 2005. This is a compilation of biographies of prominent documentary photographers that I used to research Lange's style of photography and the subject matter she was known for capturing.

<strong>Meltzer</strong>, Milton.  <em>Dorthea Lange: A Photographer's Life</em>.  Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. This is a Biography that I used to research Lange's marriage to Paul Taylor and how he instigated change in Lange's work. I also researched Lange's photographic style in general.

<strong>Shindo</strong>, Charles.  <em>Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination</em>.  Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. This is a college-level textbook that I used to research the "Migrant Mother" image and how its popularity lead to furthering the agendas of Lange and author John Steinbeck.

<strong>Street</strong>, Richard Steven. <em>Photographing Farmworkers in California</em>.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. This is a photographic documentary of Migrant farm workers in California as seen through the eyes of numerous photographers. I used this book to research the work on Lange as it relates to whether the story behind the "Migrant Mother" image was true.
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center">Thank you for reading my essay!</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><strong>Happy Thanksgiving!</strong></p>