TOThe Arizona are, then away, towards California. They travel on a blue Ford Station Wagon. It is 1936. Her name is Dorothea, she was born in 1895German origins, American from New Jersey, moved to San Francisco where he opened a photographic studio.
Small slightly, due to the polio that touched the right leg, but not for this reason renunciation of the fire inside, be a photographer. Training portraitist, too curious to close in a shopno longer just faces and bodies posing, because she is the ones that travel. At 23 they participated in a first photo shipment.
Now, while traveling the infinite roads of the great plains, he is almost 40 of years and is about to perform the business of life. Paul Schuster Taylor accompanies her, an economist known during this adventure, who married in second wedding. With her first husband, the painter Maynard Dixon, with whom he had two children, is recently over. They cross America to document people’s living conditions.
Farm Security Administration (FSA)
Dorothea, together with 11 other illustrious colleagues, was in charge of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) – The government agency in charge of promoting the policies of the New Deal wanted by President Roosevelt – which contemplates a photographic reconnaissance program. We must understand the country, observe the existential rubble after the great depression And the sandstorms that brought the central areas rurally desertificate four million square kilometers. If farmers cry, even in the city you suffer. America is prostrate. The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, the sales to sales and the devaluation of titles kick off a decade that will remain in history as the greatest crisis of all time. At least until now.
America is fury, Steinbeck’s novel
Dorothea and Paul advance on deserted roads along the arso lands, she portrays peasants and workers, he enriches his data reports, interviews and statistical analyzes. It seems to see them on the Ford Station Wagon while the sun falls behind the heights. In front of the eyes they have the west of The Grapes of Wraththe novel by John Steinbeck of ’39, winner of the Pulitzer prize from which in ’40 John Ford will make the film (in the Italian Furore translation) which will be among the best 100 in the history of American cinema. Book and then films inspired by the images of Dorothea.
Human transhumance moves from one state to another looking for new fertile lands. Dorothea crosses improvised camps, creates thousands of portraits, Documented by small stories that we will call captions, but which are much more. Nobody is an ordinary subject in front of his goal. He is a training portrait, but now he dilates the vision, embraces the landscape, he wants to keep everything inside.
Migrant Mother (migrant mother) with her children in the camp in Nipomo, California. 1936 © Dorothea Lange
Birth of an icon
A rainy evening of March 1936, Dorothea is returning home after a day of work, he has been alone and tired, for a month he has been photographed the life of the Californian farmers. On the road, Highway 101 sees a sign: “Piselli picker field”. It already has all the necessary photos, yet taken and goes to see. Here the meeting takes place that will make both the immortal protagonists, the icon Migrant Mother (Migrant mother) and her architect. Dorothea approaches, the woman does not seem happy, but lets her do it. Under a fortune tent, surrounded by his children, Her Cherokee face becomes the face of history, the mother of America on its knees, the woman of the resistance. Like the Joad family of Steinbeck’s novel, it will be the witness of the collective tragedy.
Dorothea made five slabs, a small sequence. The newspaper The San Francisco News publishes two photographs, not the icon. The article, especially the images, obtains a first result: the government sends food to the field of peas collectors. But there is no trace of the mother and her children and we will not know anything for more than 40 years.
Migrant Mother
In 1978 a woman wrote a letter to the Modesto Bee newspaper: He says he is called Florence Owens Thompson and to be Migrant Mother. The following year a reporter traces it. He lives in a caravan in Modesto, California. Being that icon was the curse of her life, she felt exploited and she was always ashamed to review the poverty that she had suffered decades earlier. A few years later, in 1983, the children of Florence, now sick, tell about his story and collect the money to make it treat. Florence dies, but the icon does not die. Dorothea Lange delivered it to immortality, a pioneer of that photograph of social denunciation that together with many other authors – among all the fresco of Lewis Hine on the working conditions of children in factories and mines – will contribute to the birth of the social consciousness and will have a significant impact to build the imagination of a world in transformation, full of contradictions, in which photography will play a fundamental role.
Dorothea and his contemporaries told the America true and torn the veil to the dream. Witnesses of their time, explorers of reality, indomitable travelers, were animated of authentic idealism.
A photograph can change the world
A photography can change the world, they think. Migrant Mother And the other icons of the Great Depression are almost a century. Today’s America is crossed by fears that evoke the eternal ghosts of human coexistence: poverty, inequality and injustice, natural disasters and men’s disasters. And we, humans of the third millennium, producers of continuous jet images that disperse in an instant, we have learned that no photography has ever saved and will never be able to save the world. On the road to the Piselli field today Dorothea would find many colleagues and, instead of the five slabs that made that late afternoon, we would have hundreds of instantaneous ones to flood the social networks and a video of the children of Migrant Mother while killing birds to eat, posted on Tiktok. Florence Owens Thompson and her beautiful face would be exploited the same, a solidarity campaign would probably start to help her. The swallowing network, the network gives. Each era has its own narrative, it is certain that Migrant Mother It preserves the immortal charm of the crystallized time, of the power of the moment. Of the precious value of five only images that from that serious moment of history belong to all humanity, not only to the one that shakes and forgets.
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