Dorothea Lange: Drawing Beauty Out Of Desolation

Many of us have an image of what the Great Depression looked like --

even if we weren't there. One reason is because of Dorothea Lange's photographs.

Images capturing an era -Remember the Powerhouse Mechanic?

Listen: NPR Author Interview with Linda Gordon Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (7 mimutes)

In 1936, 20% of the children in America couldn’t buy clothes.

Malnutrition was an epidemic. Unemployment  was at 25%.

February 1936. "Once a Missouri farmer, now a migratory farm laborer on the Pacific Coast, California." A possible prequel to The Grapes of Wrath. Photo by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration

March 1936."Nipomo, Calif Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32, the father is a native Californian.
Destitute in a pea pickers camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute."

The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

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. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960)

February 1937. "Missouri family of five, seven months from the drought area. 'Broke, baby sick, car trouble.' U.S. 99 near Tracy, California." Last seen here.  Photo by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration

March 1937. "Four families, three of them related with 15 children, from the Dust Bowl in Texas in an overnight roadside camp near Calipatria, California."  Photo by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration

http://www.shorpy.com/dorothea-lange-photographs?page=3