Shop art print and framed art 8b31749a by Dorothea Lange

Migrant Mother is Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph and one of the best known from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) programme. This image, taken with five others in February 1936, depicting Florence Owens Thompson and her children, has become the symbol of the Great Depression in the United States. Dorothea Lange was a freelance photographer who had signed a multi-year contract with the government propaganda department to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal on behalf of her own small Californian business. Dorothea Lange took this photograph in 1936, when she was employed by the US government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) programme, set up during the Great Depression to raise awareness of and help impoverished farmers. The photograph of this itinerant worker was published in several magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times on 9 July 1936. The photo airbrushed down to the young woman's image by an unscrupulous editor was published again on 10 August 1936, in the same newspaper, with an erroneous commentary. A brilliant propagandist, Roy E. Stryker, head of the R.A./F.S.A., was trying to arouse public sympathy by favouring photographic investigation. This photograph was chosen by him to express the federal government's interest in the ruined farmers. It is to the accumulation of such images that the FSA investigation owes its strength. On 6 March 1936, travelling along Route 101 along the Californian coast towards Watsonville, [...]

 

This artwork is a photography from the war and roaring twenties period. It belongs to the humanist photography styles and photojournalism styles.

 

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