Photography
I have to reply to 3 classmates discussion post. Please help me figure out what to say and plese add references.
1. Hello fellow classmates,
Today I chose to talk about photography, and Dorothea Lange’s, Migrant Mother, 1936. Dorothea Lange was a photojournalist working for the Resettlement Administration which later in 1937 turned into the Farm Security Administration (Dupecher, 2018). The Farm Security Administration was created to aid poor farmers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers and migrant workers. This administration’s mission was to resettle struggling farmers to new, soil rich lands to circumvent the Great Depression and the effect it had on agriculture. Dorothea was set off to raise awareness of this struggle.
The photograph Dorothea took was taken in Nipomo, California at a pea-picking farm. The woman portrayed in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson. Dorothea took a few different exposures and angles. In the photo shown there are Florence’s two children hiding their faces behind her. If you look close enough, you can see she is also holding a baby. The image is done in monochrome, which really pulls in an effect of an impoverished state. The photo represents both social documentary but also represents Lange’s style in a humanist art form (Kaplan, 2021). Dorothea was just doing her job documenting but at the same time captured the essence showing the ugly of struggle, but the beauty of survival. That is why this photo is a significant art object.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Pictorialists utilizing pictorialism felt that the picture should speak for itself (The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 2016). Dorothea utilized this quite well. Also catering for this photograph to be both documentational and artistic.
Thank you,
Stephen
2.. Definitively, art is nothing less than a human response to the world around us and thus, as the technology of photography has emerged as the most convenient and effective tool to capture and share that human experience in real time, this artform that is best for expressing the brightest and darkest moments of our lives is both impossible to ignore and the easiest in which to respond. The emotions evoked by Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, 1936 can be a summation of modern economic turmoil anywhere in today’s world, despite its dated origins. Ironically, this photograph is a rebuke toward any argument that photography is mere documentation and not art, and vice versa. Lange was able to capture the pain and hope conveyed in the woman’s eyes, while providing necessary comfort for her hungry children, in a migrant farm workers camp in Nipomo, California. The desperate conditions of this photograph are a result of the Great Depression and environmental conditions such as the legendary Dust Bowl (John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath tells a powerful story of tenant farmers seeking a brighter future in such conditions). Lange’s iconic snapshot was 1 of over 80,000 photographs taken in support of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), one of many government upstarts made possible by New Deal legislation, serving primarily as an advertisement for relief funding intending to aid impoverished farmers across the American West.
I combed through the lesson material to find the exact verbiage necessary to explain why this specific photograph should be considered art but was left frustrated without any explanation WHY documentary photography is unequivocally art. Argumentatively, last week’s assignment was an analysis of Goya’s depiction of a scene at the precipice of patriots’ execution while this week’s is a moment hinged upon hope. Scenic differences notwithstanding, both are patriotic in nature as well as evoke similar emotion in that we feel connection with the artists as well as their subjects portrayed/captured; they are neither abstract nor insignificant, as well as demand an acknowledgement of importance of their events shared. If anything, understanding the context of the portrait matters to the artist as much as the audience, and the intention of Migrant Mother is to highlight the importance of supporting collectivizing agriculture that would eventually transform the FSA into the Farmers Home Administration, superseding the Settlement Administration and operating successfully into the early 2000’s. With her artwork, Lange accomplished her intention of sharing with us the exigency of endurance at the behest of benevolence upon the American people in times of opposed Depression funding.
Pruitt, Sarah. “The Real Story behind the ‘Migrant Mother’ in the Great Depression-Era Photo.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 8 May 2020, https://www.history.com/news/migrant-mother-new-deal-great-depression.
Nicholas
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