Case Study: Migrant Mother

Some of my favorite photography comes out of the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl when photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott began to document the American citizens as a post gilded age population of desolate mid westerners or tough city goers, rather than the elegant bourgeois socialites of the earlier 1900s.

I also appreciate that the first real governmental use of photography in the Farm Security Administration, which set out to use photography as a journalistic tool with a artistic undertone to produce captivating images of the way life was after the social upheaval and hope to improve the lives of those documented by doing so. I think Migrant Mother is one of the best examples of this, and its iconic status has made the subject of the photo the face of the poor in America during that time, and more largely, representative of a weary eye on the future for those coming out of hard financial times, something that many people today can relate to after the "Great Recession" of 2008.

The idea that the government commissioned the Farm Security Administration of photographers and writers to go out and document daily life was reminiscent of efforts to inspire westward expansion during the days of Manifest Destiny, but where still life painters had been sent out to depict glorious images of the west, this time photographers were sent to go document people to inspire change and provide aid for their situations. In our discussions in class about the movement toward photography being accepted as an artistic medium, I think this period of time was significant, especially given that it produced an image that is still recognizable today in Lange's Migrant Mother, something we can relate to Da Vinci's Mona Lisa in that it is a mysterious image of a woman representative of society in the time it was create, and it still captivates audiences today.

As a journalism student, I also think it shows a significance in the designation that photography has a journalistic purpose while maintaining its artistic nature, and was the beginnings of photojournalism being an accepted form of both art and reporting.