Every Picture Tells A Story… But Whose?

The FSA photographs of the Great Depression

Photography of Florence Owens Thompson, known as “Migrant Mother” (detail), Pea-Pickers Camp, Nipomo, California. Source Wikimedia Commons

There are few social-documentary photographs more well known, nor more heavily plundered for significance, than those of rural America from the era of the Great Depression. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is perhaps the most famous. Other images include shots of sharecroppers, cotton pickers and economic refugees from the deep-south. As images, they have become part of a sort of American folklore, a complex heritage that over the decades since has engaged sociologists, art historians and critical theorists in broad scope.

Lange and her colleagues won great praise for their photographs of migrant workers. Photographer Edward Steichen described them as “the most remarkable human documents ever rendered in pictures.”

A remarkable image

To take a moment to look more closely at the photo Migrant Mother, the first thing to notice is that it’s all-immersive, by which I mean that the subject fills the frame and any sense of context or place is omitted. We may discern something of the woman herself, through her clothing and her children, but what lies beyond the frame is completely inaccessible to the viewer.