Feelings.

Photo by Dorothea Lange

Each photograph conveys a feeling, an idea, an emotion.

Dorothea Lange is most famous for her Depression-era photography.  This photography captured a truly human side of those photographed.  Lange captured both the beautiful and the difficult.  As seen in “Migrant Mother,” Lange was able to capture the idea of the hard life that the mother lived during these times while caring for her children.  The worry and stress is clearly show in the mother’s face as her children hold on to her for comfort and support. 

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.