About the Photo
Title: Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona
Creator Name: Lange, Dorothea
Creator Nationality: North American; American
Creation Date: 1940
Object Type: Photographs
Medium: | Photographs, Photograph | Gelatin silver print (printed c. 1950) |
| Creation Place: | United States |
| Culture: | United States |
| Style: | 20th century |
About the Photographer :
DOROTHEA LANGE (1895-1965)
Dorothea Lange has been known as the greatest American documentary photographer. She is best known for her chronicles of the displaced farm families and migrant workers during the Great Depression. The Migratory Cotton picker is one of them. The most poignant image done by her is called: The Migrant Mother
This picture explicitly depict the anxious and destitue mother: Florence Owens Thompson (age 32) and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California, which has become the icon of the Great Depression era.
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).
Dorothea Lange was fiercely independent, she dropped her middle name and adopted her mother's mainden name as family name after her father abandoned the family when she was 12 years old. The other traumatic incident happened to her is her contraction of polio at age of 7 which left her with a wakened right leg and a permanent limp. The pain of her childhood, however, gave her a fuller sense of what suffering meant, and later on when she worked for the government to document the effect of the depression, her compassion for the destitution and despair of migratory families were deepened. She has always believed that the undertanding of the psychological aspect of her subject is essential in making a portrait. When she walked in to camps, talking to the hoeless pea-pickers and refugees of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, they are starving to death and desperate for a better living condition. She talked to them untill they feel comfortable enough to let her take pictures. Her limp, she thought, created an instant rapport between herself and her subjects. She siad that people trusted her more because she didnt appear "whole and secure" in the face of their poverty and insecurity.
At 1941, she later gave up a prestigious award (Guggenheim Fellowship)to record the forced evacuation of Jpanese American tointernment Camps, which is against the federal givernment's will and many these photographs were censored untill later (1972), the Witney Museum commemorates her work and held an exhibit.
Backgroud of the picture: Great Depression
The Great Depression in the US began with the stock market crash of october 29th, 1929, known as Black Tuesday, which is the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, and deflation.
During the Depression, the government created jobs for writers, scholars and artists though various documentary assignment, and Lange was one of them. In 1934, she met her second husband : economist paul Schuster Taylor from UC, Berkeley, who taught her the social and political issues, they travelled together to rural area documenting poverty and exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers- Taylor interciewing and gathering economic data while lange taking photos. They published the American Exodus in 1939.
Backgroud of the picture: Great Depression
The Great Depression in the US began with the stock market crash of october 29th, 1929, known as Black Tuesday, which is the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, and deflation.
During the Depression, the government created jobs for writers, scholars and artists though various documentary assignment, and Lange was one of them. In 1934, she met her second husband : economist paul Schuster Taylor from UC, Berkeley, who taught her the social and political issues, they travelled together to rural area documenting poverty and exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers- Taylor interciewing and gathering economic data while lange taking photos. They published the American Exodus in 1939.
Farmers from the Midwest were so devastated by the economic harships and draought that they made a long trip all the way to the west in search for jobs, lands and dignity. They wanted a new start, but was faced a harsh reality.They are proletarian class who are forced to till the soil for others. They migrate relecutantly, seeking a foothold on the land, which it seldom gains.Lange's photo humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. Her works inspired Steinbeck's "The grapes of Wrath" which in turn inspired a film adaptation.
About the picure
Style: Social Realism ,Vernacular Modernism
The picture resembles Courbet's realism painting: The Stone Breakers where the figure rendered anonymously, faces unclear or lost in shadows - an epitome of a certain class of work rather than their individuality. In both works, the image of the men are captured from a relatively lower angle which turns the subject into a position of heros. The image of the cotton picker is clearly magnified, stretching to all directions in the photo, symbolizing a strong human spirit in the time of difficulties. Though we cant even see his entire face, we can imagine what was going on there, we can hear his inner cry for a better living condition. our compassion is invoked instantly once we look at the picture, our eyes linger bewteen those eyes and the withered palm. In this way the image is much more powerful than any other colourful photo or photo with an entire sad face.
Three Contrasts: 1. The contrast between the white cloth of the cotton picking bag and the dark shadow created by his hand, from which we can tell that this picture is taking outside, probably in the middle of the endless cotton field under the burning sun.
2. Between the lighted bright forehead from the sun and the melancholic eyes merged in the shadow.
3. Between the rough dark dirty palm and the white gaps between the dehydrated parts of the fingers, indicating the long hard work down by those hands.
References:
Oral history interview with Dorothea Lange, 1964 May 22, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
"Migratory Farm Labor in the United States" New Deal Documents
(accessed Apr. 11, 2011)
Meltzer, Milton Dorothea Lange: a photographer's life. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999
"Dorothea Lange ..the greatest American documentary photographer" Oxford School of Photography
(accessed Apr. 11, 2011)
