The Power of Survival-an Analysis of Dorthea Langes Migrant Mother

The Power of Survival

Dorthea Lange, employed by the Farm Security Administration, was told that her job was to “introduce America to Americans”, and that she did. In a four-year time span, Lange took hundreds of remarkable photographs, but one stood out of the bunch like a needle in a haystack—Migrant Mother. The photograph was taken at a migrant pea pickers’ camp in 1936, and was the last and most tightly composed of six photographs taken that day. Lange had captured a moment that viewers could sympathize with; a close-up and powerful shot, free of extraneous details, that instantaneously symbolized poverty, motherhood, and survival.

The destitution in this photograph is undisguised, making it nearly impossible to have no emotional reaction. We see a penniless migrant family, struggling just to survive. The mother and her children appear to be extremely fatigued and their clothing alone suggests their poverty. Migrant mother is dressed in a well-worn gray shirt with cut off sleeves, and her children’s clothing is no better. The young blonde boy has holes of some sort on his left sleeve while the infant is wrapped in a grimy blanket or coat— not something a mother would wrap her child in by choice. The other young boy is wearing a coat that hangs loosely off his right shoulder, suggesting that the coat is much too large for him. What’s more is that the clothing has not been washed for quite some time and, likewise, the mother and children themselves do not look as though they themselves have bathed recently. As Curtis said in his piece, Lange had the ability to “make verbal descriptions superfluous”; she did not have to note the poverty in her photo’s caption because she instead noted it in her photo’s composition (Curtis 1-20).

Since there is no father in this image, one can assume that the mother is the sole caretaker for her children; that being the case, she is the one responsible for their survival and well-being. The composition itself...