Picture Essay, Zoe Wilson-Groark

Daughter of Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner Living in American River Camp near Sacramento, California (1936), Dorthea Lange

Dorthea Lange in this piece and in many others, is able to take a photograph, and make capturing an instant seem to stretch into infinity. With the high contrast in black and white, and expressions raw on the faces of each person she takes, she is able to communicate a sincerity and dramaticism that truly stands out.

    In Daughter of Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner Living in American River Camp near Sacramento, California, Lange employs the Rule of Thirds nicely, the point of focus being her face, her hands. The eye then travels down her body to the rusted seat arm rest, then drifts over to the right, the metal bucket. The dark background and clothing make her skin pop, standing out against the backdrop, and her expression pulls you in. The lighting is soft, and combined with her expression it leaves the viewer with a sense of empathy for the subject as well as sorrow. Lange focuses her camera to be trained on the woman, blurring out the backdrop and forcing the viewer to confront something unpleasant or unhappy, instead of getting distracted and caught up among the details that would otherwise be visible in the background.

    This picture, historically, says something specific. During the 1930s, the economy of the United States was caught in the middle of the turmoil of the Great Depression, and to make matters worse, the heartland of America had a unique brand of suffering that came to be known as the Dust bowl. Farmland became useless from overworking the soil. Nothing would grow, and large dust storms would tear apart the land even more as there were no trees to keep things held together. Impoverished and starving farmers moves west to California with the promise of work, and arrived to find each job overstaffed, wages abysmal, people starving. This was a reality that many privileged Americans did not want to face, preferring instead to pretend things were still fine. Ignore the rampant poverty that riddled the country. And this is what Lange’s camera captures in this photograph. The stress, the mystery, and the strain of these workers and their families.

From a more meta perspective, Lange took photography of many farm workers, people of color (especially black people) included. It becomes apparent that these photographs showed African Americans in just as impoverished, if not even more desperate situations. And it was obvious that this was nothing new. Extreme poverty has always been a part of the United States, but people only seem to care when it starts affecting white people too. This hasn’t changed.