Migrant Mother Analysis

The Revolution of 1848 is commonly regarded as the beginning of the Realism movement in France, but artworks created in the years surrounding the revolution also convey the social issues brought about by the unstable political system. Artists departed from Romanticism, which had been popular since the late 18th century, and in turn abandoned the drama, emotion, and exotic subject matter that accompanied the artistic movement. In contrast, artists began to favor the portrayal of ‘real life’ situations, creating the birth of Realism. Realists avoided depicting people in any artificial way, shown by the emphasis placed on the reality of the working class and the lack of heroic figures. Instead, realist works portrayed people and issues with accuracy …show more content…
Both Millet and Lange focus on living conditions and poverty for the homeless. In Lange’s black and white photograph, Florence Owens Thompson, a thirty-two year old mother of seven, comforts three of her children. She holds a sleeping baby, and two older children bury their faces in her shoulders. She appears to be older than she is, tanned from manual labor, worried, and tired. Thompson and her family were traveling to Watsonville, CA, where they hoped to find work, but their car broke down near a pea-pickers camp in Nipomo Mesa, CA. They joined 2,500-3,500 other out-of-work agricultural workers at the camp, where Dorothea Lange, a photographer employed by the Resettlement Administration, took seven photographs of Thompson. The Resettlement Administration was established in 1935 as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, which focused on protecting the welfare and health of the American people. Florence Owens Thompson, an unemployed mother without a way to support her children, became an icon of resilience in the face of adversity as a result of Lange’s photograph, with many critics describing this artwork as the ultimate photo of the Great Depression. While Migrant Mother brings focus upon the hardships of migrant farmworkers, Lange’s other photographs feature a variety of minority groups of all genders, religions, races, and citizenship statuses. Like Millet, she primarily photographed laborers and the dispossessed, causing her work to appear to have the common theme that the people featured have more worth than their current conditions. In this sense, Dorothea Lange has become a social critic because of the statement of politics and society that accompanies her