For this weeks blog post I decided to focus on the well known and inspirational photograph captured by photographer Dorothea Lange. Her first real taste of documentary photography came in the 1920’s when she traveled around the Southwest, mostly photographing Native Americans. With the onslaught of the Great Depression in the 1930s, she trained her camera on what she started to see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes and breadlines. This body of work included Lange’s most well-known portrait, ‘Migrant Mother’, an iconic image from this period that gently and beautifully captured the hardship and pain of what so many Americans were experiencing.

Lange’s access to the inner lives of these struggling Americans was the result of patience and careful consideration of the people she photographed. “Her method of work,” was often to just saunter up to the people and look around, and then when she saw something that she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera, look at it, and if she saw that they objected, why, she would close it up and not take a photograph, or perhaps she would wait until… they were used to her.”

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet.  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.” -Dorothea Lange

the Image link: http://100photos.time.com/photos/dorothea-lange-migrant-mother

Who is the practitioner (what is their name?) and when were they practicing?

The practitioner was known as Dorothea Lange. She took this photograph in 1936, while employed by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed during the Great Depression to raise awareness of and provide aid to impoverished farmers. In Nipomo, California. She was practising for about 10 years.

With the photo you are examining when was it produced (date)?

This photograph was produced back in the year of 1936 in either February or March in Nipomo, California.

How was the photo authored?

The photo was taken with The Graflex Super D. A very remarkable camera loved by professional photographers back in that era. The Super D was the successor of the Graflex Series D. The photograph captured was in Black and White and obviously not in full HD quality and the original negatives are 4×5″ film.

How was the photo distributed:

Even though images were commissioned by the government they were impounded and not shown to the public even after the war ended. Lange’s photograph was kept a secret for almost 50 years and visually showed how the United States government detained people without charging them of any crime based on their Japanese ethnicity, even if most were Americans. Lange’s images sat in the National Archives until 2006. These images, even in today’s society, remain of critical importance. The work now is showcased in the Library of Congress.