Essays on Dorothea Lange

It is a photo of Florence Owens Thompson and her children taken by one Dorothea Lange of the Farm Security Administration documentary. The migrant mother photograph as has become popularly known has been a perfect representation of the untold suffering of the average working American class that lived in the period of The Great Depression. The photo artist brings viewers of the photograph to the personal space of the subject of the picture Florence Thompson and her children. This enables the photo artist to highlight an issue of great concern in the society and one that needs immediate action. ...

Abstract

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was established to address chronic rural poverty during the Great Depression in the US. A string of known and unknown artists was hired by the organization to capture the images of poverty and lives of rural farmers, with the hope of garnering support for them. The essay describes FSA briefly and then goes on to select a social documentary photograph from an FSA photographer. It evaluates the photograph and how successful it is in expressing the hardships faced by countless rural farmers and migrants during the 1930s. The essay discusses the selected photographer Dorothea ...

A picture paints a thousand words. It speaks audible words that penetrate the hearts of those on lookers scrutinizing them. It speaks louder than expected. Pictures are frequently found on advertisements, billboards, magazines, internet, television, and other media. They are intended to convey an idea in the most brief, concise and effective way. A picture is worth more than a thousand words. It screeches diverse messages depending on how one views them. It squeals in the most simple and subtle manner where the echoes are carried by those who has seen them even for a long time. It is an effortless medium ...

Migrant Mother; Dorothea Lange, 1936 is a unique visual project mainly aimed at diagnosing the American economic ills of that time and its future prospects. Psychologists believe Lange’s ability to place a photograph in its context has managed to create the sharpness of its critical edge more apparent. The photograph managed to challenge the entire agricultural, political economy. The photographs have also wakened up some scholars and politicians to understand the detrimental effects of the racism (Paine 1). Among the documentary photographs, Migrant Mother; Dorothea Lange, 1936 was an exemplary in both prevailing styles and meanings of the world. Her ...

Modern trends in photography are the logical development of ideas and aspirations that we see in the works of artists of the IX – XX centuries. Thus we can clearly see the similarity in the closely cropped low-key lighting portraits, that are so popular today and the ones, created almost century and a half ago by Julia Margaret Cameron. The way she used to shoot expressive portraits of celebrities, not widely appreciated in her own day, became widespread among world-class photographers nowadays. Adam Clark Vroman with his landscape, cloudscape and architectural views, had a great impact on ethnographic/documentary photography. He ...

Purpose

The purpose of the collection by Dorothea Lange was to depict the life in the early days of camp, a period when barracks were under construction, classrooms were not arranged orderly and the internees led a very uncertain life. The aim of the curator was to catch the semi-tragic life that her subjects led.

Question at Issue

Is the depiction of the life that the women lead as seen in the collection an accurate representation of the state of affairs in the barracks? This question is important because Dorothea Lange was a photographer with zeal, and her work in this collection captured the semi-tragic life ...

Dorothea Lange was already famous as a photographer of the Great Depression with her stark and harrowing images creating what can only be termed as a sensation. Her stark and no hold barred imagery of the sheer poverty and destitution found in the Depression rankled people’s hearts and created a sense of outrage. Lange was commissioned by the War Department to take photographs of the Japanese internment that took place just after Pearl Harbour. Although she was working for the War Relocation Authority, Lange was definitely not prepared for the sheer scale of civil rights abuses that were caused by ...

FDR – Advocate of the American People

In his seminal essay, David M Kennedy speaks about Franklin Roosevelt’s politician’s sensibility which he brought to the White House. According to his press secretary Theodore Joslin, Roosevelt had an incredible memory especially of localized politics and the officials who populated several far flung counties across the whole United States. Kennedy also compared Roosevelt with Hoover with the latter having a mathematician’s taste for things while Roosevelt was much more the consummate politician in every way. Kennedy’s essay focuses on several important elements which revealed Roosevelt’s unique personality especially the Cermak incident where the ...

A road trip can be defined as any journey by road, regardless of destination or stops en route. Characteristically, road trips in the contemporary society relates to long distances by automobile. Road tripping is typically about dreams; it encompasses dreaming on landscapes and cities and looking forward to exploring them. Road tripping and also entail hardships, paddling down rivers, slogging though thick canopies, confronting suspicious people, testing ones adaptability, exploring hostile places and anticipating for some kind of revelation. Both John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange engaged in documenting what they saw on their road trip, one through books and ...

The Great Depression, HIS 204

Iconic Image of Great Depression Poverty and Despair: Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange The Great Depression as Era of Radical Activism and Political: The Successful Conclusion of the 1937 Sit-Down Strike at General Motors ABSTRACT Thus essay will describe the causes and consequences of the Great Depression of 1929-41, which was the worst economic upheaval in U.S. history. It will discuss the various theories about the causes of the Depression, such as Keynesian under-consumption or the monetarist view that the Federal Reserve Board failed in its duties. Then it will continue to describe the results of ...