How does my mum’s role as breadwinner abdicate from her culture?

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

Motherhood is the state or experience of having and raising a child.

In this essay, the first thing I am going to do is 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’ In particular because it is such a well-known photograph with a powerful context behind it which is very interesting to me. Furthermore I have found that 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 was born in Madeira which means that the female exceptions of her are very different to the role that she ‘plays’ now.  To explore this concept 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 before and now.

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange

‘Humanity is a hypothesis that has run its course’ ( Aragon 2002:21) – Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer

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 then 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 their car to buy food. On the other hand Florence Owens Thompson who is ‘Migrant Mother’ herself says that the encounter happened differently. 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 Lange had also promised that the photographs would not be published, however she sent it to San Francisco News as well as to the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. Since then the photograph has become an Icon and a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.

Propaganda is the formation, of photographs or other sources of information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Some people argue that the photograph of Migrant Mother was used as propaganda to raise awareness of the 1930’s from a specific point of view, which is the depression and poverty. The photograph is of a mother and her children which are subjects that everyone can relate too and therefore this creates a lot of empathy from the viewers. The photographs were also used to raise money, however none of that money was given to Migrant Mother herself, and however some of the money that was raised was given to the people on the crop farm where the photograph was originally taken. The photographs were then appropriated on to many things such as stamps and cartoons; so much so it soon became the most reproduced photograph in the history of photography.

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