How does my mums role as breadwinner abdicate from her culture?

“A Legend of the Strength of… Motherhood.” ^[20]

INTRODUCTION:

Motherhood is the state or experience of having and raising a child. In this essay I am also going to analyse and compare the links between my personal study outcomes and Dorothea Lange’s Iconic ‘Migrant Mother’ photographs. I have chosen to analyse the photograph of ‘Migrant Mother’ because it is such a well-known photograph with a powerful context behind it which is very interesting to me, furthermore it relates to my personal study.  Secondly, I am going to explore my mum’s work ethic, female traditional roles and how my mums’ role as a breadwinner of my family abdicates from her culture. My mum being born in Madeira means that the female exceptions of her are very different to the role that she ‘plays’ now.  To explore this I have been photographing my mum in her working environment over a period of months. I am also going to include my personal archive photographs to compare my mum’s role then and now.

PARAGRAPH 1:

In 1939 during the Great Depression Dorothea Lange was working on a project for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which was created to help combat American poverty. The aim of this project was to capture the effect that the Great Depression had on people. According to Dorothea Lange, this photograph was taken when she was driving past a camp site and she stopped and approached ‘Migrant Mother’ within 10-15 minutes she had taken 6 different exposures. Dorothea Lange said that ‘Migrant Mother’ had been living off frozen vegetables from the field and wild birds the children caught and they could not move on, because her husband had just sold the tires from the car to buy food. On the other hand Florence Owens Thompson who is ‘Migrant Mother’ herself says that the encounter was different.  She said that the photograph was taken on a camping site where they had set up temporarily while her husband had gone to get the car radiator repaired. Lange had also promised that the photographs would not be published, however she sent it to San Francisco News as well as to the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. Since then the photograph has become an Icon and a representation of the Great Depression so much so that the photograph became the most reproduced photo in the history of photography, it was reproduced on things such as stamps all the way to cartoons.