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 Lange and analyzes the work “Migrant Mother,” its subject matter and the emotion. The image truly reflects the sufferings and pain of those farmers in the everyday lives. The particular photo has earned worldwide fame and is well known. FSA program was responsible for documenting the socioeconomic conditions of the agricultural groups during the Depression.
Introduction
Photographs do not speak to us but move us emotionally. They carry the power to fill us with amazement, grief, horror or happiness. The historic photos inform us something about the past, the people, what they wore, the buildings they lived in or what they did.
Great Depression influenced the art movements where the artists focused on everyday life and conditions of the working class and displayed realistic rural scenes. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was developed to help in the resettlement of rural populations. FSA’s goals were to reverse the socioeconomic conditions and especially the lowest income agricultural groups (Grey, 1989). However, the program was also responsible for documenting the life during the Depression and supported highly prolific photography.
The focus of the essay is on the photographers who worked under the FSA program during the Great Depression. I have selected the work of the photographer Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother as this is one of the most famous work from the era of the Great Depression and I feel that it truly represents the sufferings and misery in the everyday lives of the migrants. The particular photo by Lange has become one of the most recognized images and shows the young mother with her three children, huddling together for comfort and solace. This is a heart-wrenching portrayal of the poverty and brings face to face the realities of the rural farmers and workers of the 1930s.
The FSA
The FSA was initiated in 1937 and was an offshoot of the Resettlement Administration that was created in 1935. Photography was one of the most powerful and effective tools to display the plight of the farmers. It was believed that the realistic images of the life of the farmers and their poverty would create public support for the federal agencies and help to alleviate the misery of the farmers. FSA was one of the federal agencies and a photographic section for the agency was created to document the farm conditions. Roy Emerson Stryke was the head, and he got many unheard of and unknown photographers to do the task. Some of the names were Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein and more (Stevens, & Fogel, 2001). The FSA medical care program represents a special experiment during the depression and in the history of American medicine. There was a rising demand for free medical services and incomes were falling.
FSA programs were designed to improve the lives of the poor and provide benefits to the most impoverished farmers in the United States. It did success in improving the lives of thousands of rural families and introduced cutting-edge agricultural programs. According to Roberts, (2013), it was the only major federal program that was wrestling with the problems of rural poverty during the Depression era.
FSA photographers
Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs documented scenes of poverty from the urban and rural America during the Great Depression. One of the purposes behind was to support New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The major collection of FSA photographs portrays struggle and resilience. However, there were also images created with the intent to portray a new, prosperous America (Reblando, 2014). The focus of the FSA photographers was heavily on documenting rural poverty and show lives of impoverished farm families amidst the agricultural problems. The agricultural character of America was destroyed by miscalculations of earlier agricultural policies and the Dust Bowl (Reblando, 2014).
FSA photographers had a tricky role. On one hand, they needed to illustrate poverty and on the other side, their photographs had to send the message that it was the times and not the fault of anyone. Americans have been used to linking poverty to an absence of character. FSA and its team of photographers sought the explanation and the solution for the Great Depression that it was just bad luck and not the fault of bad character as stated by Murphy (2001). The rural poor were to be portrayed as victims whose lives could be turned around.
FSA photographic collection is vast and complex and represents the American mind in its photographic history. The Great Depression was particularly hard on the farmer, and they had to endure not just the economic crisis, but a string of natural disasters that robbed them of their livelihoods and destroyed their crops. Thousands of poverty-stricken families were migrating to the agricultural fields of California, looking for food and work.
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is one of the most famous photographs from the Great Depression. It shows the resilience and desperation on the face of the mother. Like many other Great Depression pictures, the image is humanistic and compelling. Her photographs successfully document the suffering taking place during the Great Depression. She was born in New Jersey. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother a housewife. Lange felt that the effects of polio on her life were positive ones as the illness formed and guided her, humiliated her as well as helped her. As both her parents were strong advocates for education, art and literature were important parts of her upbringing. She was exposed to creative works during her childhood.
Dorothea Lange’s portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression have left a deep imprint on the later documentary photography. She photographed the unemployed and wanderers during the Great Depression. Her photographs of migrant workers with captions have been on display at major exhibitions and showed her skills as a documentary photographer. She developed the interest in documentary photography around the 1920s when she traveled and photographed Native Americans. She trained her camera to catch the events of the Great Depression such as labor strikes and bread lines in the 1930s (Dorothea Lange Biography, 2016). Lange’s most well-known portrait is “Migrant Mother,” which is an iconic image from this period and the picture of a migrant mother is done in an artful manner. The photograph captures the hardship and pain of countless American migrants. The work hangs in the Library of Congress today.
The Migrant Mother
Lange’s most well-known portrait is “Migrant Mother,” which is an iconic image from this period. The photograph captures the hardship and pain of countless American migrants. The work hangs in the Library of Congress today.
Source: Looking at Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. (2013). Cphmag. Retrieved from http://cphmag.com/migrant-mother/
The black and white photograph, “Migrant Mother” shows the image of a worn out mother with a look of desperation on her face. She was a pea-picker and mother of seven children. The close-up view shows the woman with three children nestling close to her.
The children hide their faces away from the camera as they bury their heads behind the back of their mother. From their clothes and unkempt hair, it is easy to make out the poor conditions of their lives.
The mother places her right hand under her chin and looks ahead with fixed eyes. She is young but looks much older because of the tired eyes and wrinkles on her weather-beaten face. Her hair looks disheveled, and she doesn’t seem to care about her looks or appearance. Her hands look rough and worn out. There are crow lines around her eyes, and her forehead is covered with wrinkles. Her lips are thin and dry and sag down a bit along with her cheeks. Her clothes are shabby, old and tattered at the sleeves. The baby lying in her lap is just barely visible, and one can make out that he is sleeping.
There is a look of desperation on the face of the woman as if she has lost control over her life and didn't know what will happen next. She seems to be in deep thought. After all, her biggest priority would be to arrange for the next meal for her family. The slightly down-turned corner of her mouth touched by her hand is a gesture of anxiety. She seems to have done all she could for her family and seems to have no clue as to what to do next or when will all the misery around her end. The children are pressing against her, looking for comfort, but she seems to be in search for solace. Now she has come to a stage where she doesn't seem to care much and is oblivious to her children, the sufferings, and the camera. Her gaze does not meet the camera’s lens, and she doesn’t care either about the presence of the photographer or her camera.
Migrant Mother is certainly the work of art and carries all the power and effectiveness of a documentary photograph. This is a classic triangular composition with the mother’s face in the centers and the two small heads on either side. Lange’s Migrant Mother has become one of the best remembered ever and synonymous with the Great Depression. They lend a voice to create awareness of a part of America that was left behind in the race of modernity and capitalism as asserted by Reblando, (2014).
The photographers of the FSA were hired to photograph the rural poor and worked for the federal government. Their work provided a complex portrait of that era and became a model that was followed by many photographers later. Today, photographers continue to use their camera for the social cause and uplift. Sometimes they work as photojournalists, independently or with the government agencies. Dedicated photographers feel that if they show the reality in their pictures truthfully, they have the power to move the society and force it to respond. Photographs such as Migrant Mother have come to represent the suffering and poverty of countless victims of the Great Depression. Such pictures take one back in time and do not allow us to forget the sufferings endured by mankind in its history on the planet.
References
Dorothea Lange Biography. (2016). Biography Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/people/dorothea-lange-9372993
Grey, M. R. (1989). Poverty, politics, and health: The farm security administration medical care program, 1935-1945. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 44(3), 320-350. doi:10.1093/jhmas/44.3.320
Murphy, M. (2001). Picture/Story: Representing gender in montana farm security administration photographs. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 22(3), 93-115. doi:10.1353/fro.2001.0043
Reblando, J. (2014). Farm security administration photographs of greenbelt towns: Selling utopia during the great depression. Utopian Studies, 25(1), 52-86. doi:10.5325/utopianstudies.25.1.0052 Roberts, C. K. (2013). Client failures and supervised credit in the farm security administration. Agricultural History, 87(3), 368-390. doi:10.3098/ah.2013.87.3.
Stevens, R. L., & Fogel, J. A. (2001). Images of the great depression: A photographic essay. OAH Magazine of History, 16(1), 11-16. doi:10.1093/maghis/16.1.11
