Dorothea Lange was a documentary photographer who was most famous for her depression-era work, which helped develop documentary photography. She began this line of work in December of 1935, after divorcing her husband, Maynard Dixon. She then married an economics Professor from University of California, Berkeley by the name of Paul Schuster Taylor. For five years they traveled and documented the Great Depression with all of its social and political matters. Migrant Mother, her most famous work, depicts a mother by the name of Florence Owens Thompson. In the photo she has a hand on her face, a child in arms, and two other children leaning on her shoulders. Florence was at a stage of starvation and not even her children could bring a smile to her face. She seems to be holding it together for her children but she doesn't look very happy. Another photo by Dorothea Lange, which is not very well known, shows a different story. Migrant Cotton Picker and Her Baby was taken in the late 1940s on an Arizona Cotton farm. It is a black and white photo showing a female cotton picker sitting in a chair holding her sleeping child. The background is slightly blurred but you can still make out a few items that are there. Was life really that hard then?.
As we all know, the Great Depression was one of the worst events in American History. It didn't just affect one race or culture, but literally the whole world. It began in 1929 after a fall in stock prices around September 4th of the same year. Then on October 29, 1929 (Known as Black Tuesday) it became worldwide news when the stock market crashed. Cities worldwide were hit hard, trade fell more than 50% and the unemployment rate was up to more than 33% in some countries. By the mid 1930s some countries were able to bounce back from the depression, but for other countries it took almost a little more than 15 years. TheOur Migrant Cotton Picker is an African American woman, which in the 1940s meant she was practically no one.
