Like many others I suppose, I have this Dorothea Lange photograph, mostly referred to as “Migrant Mother”, imprinted on some region of my brain. For me, it has come to represent the extreme rural poverty of the United States in the Great Depression years between the World Wars of the 20th century. When, then, I was writing about Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila” last year, it seemed like an appropriate visual representation of the itinerant life Lila led as a child and young woman.
And whenever I think about John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath I also have such images in my mind’s eye; going now to look, I see the cover print is in fact not from Lange rather includes one from Walker Evans of a farmer family – one not unlike the Joads perhaps.
It is interesting to note that both Lange and Evans worked for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration during the 1930s. Whether their paths crossed I can’t say, but it is as a consequence of this government employment and many of their images therefore falling in the public domain, that we may thank for their continuing presence today.
Not living in NYC nor likely to get there anytime soon, this NY Times magazine piece on the current MoMA exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (through May 9 2020) is informative only indirectly, but does provoke anew thoughts on internal migration, and the underlying circumstance of economic hardship abetted by the unholy alliance between the machinations of big capital and the vagaries of climate and land, and its more sinister iteration when it is driven not only by economic needs but by racism and segregation – the great migratory movements of African-Americans out of the South, northward and westward, in search of jobs and dignity.
On the MoMA website are some wonderful resources that hopefully will remain available long after the exhibition finishes. And here is a trailer that gives some sense of an extraordinary woman who sought and found the human condition in every face, and whose photo-journalism has become art without losing the power of the very real moments she captured with her eye and camera.