A Photo Teacher |

© Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress, Destitute Pea Pickers in California (Migrant Mother), Nipomo, California, 1936

On a late afternoon and exhausted from photographing earlier as one of the photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the social condition as a result of the Depression, Dorothea Lange turned down a dirt road to investigate a migrant camp of pea pickers. In less than fifteen minutes, Lange was back on the road after making five exposures of a woman (Florence Thompson) and her children in the camp. One of these images, Migrant Mother, became a symbol of the Depression as well as one of the most iconic and important photographs in the history of photography. Over 70 years after the photograph was made, it has been used in a variety of contexts, including as a postage stamp as well as an illustration for the Bohemia Venezolana and Black Panther magazines.

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Migrant Mother stamp from Celebrating the Century – 1930′s commemorative stamp collection (left), Bohemia Venezolana magazine cover, 1964 (middle) and Black Panther magazine, 1973 (right)

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After reading the essay, Case Study | Image Analysis: The Example of Migrant Mother by Derrick Price and Liz Wells from Photography: A Critical Introduction (Chapter 1 – Thinking about Photography: debates, historically and now), consider and respond to the following questions:

From both historical and contemporary contexts, how was (and is) the photograph considered as a form of social and historical evidence in terms of what it reveals and how it was used?

Discuss your thoughts on what the photograph suggests and reveals with regards to class, race and gender?

What are your thoughts on how the photograph functioned as an iconic image of the Depression and for whom do the photograph benefited?

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Click on the Adobe Acrobat PDF file to download:  Case Study – Migrant Mother.pdf