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Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother, 1936
This iconic photograph of a 32-year-old impoverished mother and her three children does not show a single detail of the destitute pea pickers’ camp where they lived. Still, it evokes the uncertainty and despair resulting from continual poverty. Featured in newspapers nationwide, this photo and others from the camp shocked America’s conscience and spurred the federal government to ship 20,000 pounds of food to California migrant workers. |
Picturing America has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Because democracy demands wisdom.
This artfully done short is a timely reminder of the hardships endured in the Great Depression which, unfortunately, are being played out in different – but just as desperate – ways by the growing numbers of unemployed and working poor in America today.
[...] Lange's granddaughter, Diana Taylor, in a film interview that in their time, Lange's photographs were thought to be “purely propaganda for communism. That what they thought, propaganda for communism. [...]