- Look closely at this photograph noticing the details in the figures of the woman and the children.
- What do you first notice when you look at this photograph?
- Discuss why our attention is drawn to this part of the image. Light shines on the woman’s face, her right arm and hand lead toward her face, and the children turn toward her.
- Describe the woman’s clothing. The sleeve of her sweater is ragged and torn. She wears an open-neck, checked shirt under her sweater.
- What does the clothing suggest about the woman and children? They are poor.
- Discuss with students how Lange focuses our attention on just the woman and her children. What doesn’t she show?
- What is in the background? As Lange moved closer and closer to this scene, snapping photographs as she approached, she gradually cropped out the background—the tent that the woman was sitting in front of. In this close-up, the woman and her children fill the composition.
- Describe the expression on this woman’s face. How does she feel? What might she be thinking? She seems to stare out into space with a furrowed brow and down-turned mouth. She appears worried and tired. Perhaps she’s wondering what to do next or where they will find food.
- Speculate on why the children turned their heads away from the camera. Maybe they were shy, or maybe they were afraid of a strange woman with a camera and are seeking their mother’s comfort. Lange could also have posed them this way for greater effect.
- Why might Lange have decided to take such a close-up photograph? It brings us closer to the subject and makes it more personal.
- Why did the Resettlement Administration want to document the effects of the Great Depression in photographs rather than just words and statistics. Photographs can be powerful eyewitness accounts that allow people to quickly grasp the meaning and emotion of an event.
- This photograph was published in newspapers. How do you think Americans responded to it? They were outraged that this should happen in America; the federal government responded by shipping thousands of pounds of food to feed the migrants.
- Discuss with students how Lange focuses our attention on just the woman and her children. What doesn’t she show?
- What is in the background? As Lange moved closer and closer to this scene, snapping photographs as she approached, she gradually cropped out the background—the tent that the woman was sitting in front of. In this close-up, the woman and her children fill the composition.
- Describe the expression on this woman’s face. How does she feel? What might she be thinking? She seems to stare out into space with a furrowed brow and down-turned mouth. She appears worried and tired. Perhaps she’s wondering what to do next or where they will find food.
- Speculate on why the children turned their heads away from the camera. Maybe they were shy, or maybe they were afraid of a strange woman with a camera and are seeking their mother’s comfort. Lange could also have posed them this way for greater effect.
- Why might Lange have decided to take such a close-up photograph? It brings us closer to the subject and makes it more personal.
- Why did the Resettlement Administration want to document the effects of the Great Depression in photographs rather than just words and statistics. Photographs can be powerful eyewitness accounts that allow people to quickly grasp the meaning and emotion of an event.
- This photograph was published in newspapers. How do you think Americans responded to it? They were outraged that this should happen in America; the federal government responded by shipping thousands of pounds of food to feed the migrants.
White Angel Breadline, San Fransisco, Dorothea Lange, 1933 - What is going on in this picture?
• How would you describe the expression on the face of the man turned toward the viewer? What might he be thinking about?
• Would the meaning of this picture change if several of the men faced toward the camera, instead of just one? Explain your answer.
• Compare the dress and expression of the man who faces the camera with the appearance of the other men in the picture. Why has Lange singled him out?
• Where do you think Lange stood to take this picture?
• Can you find any patterns or repeating motifs? How do they contribute to the photograph's meaning?
• Do you think a person needs to have personally experienced unemployment and hunger to understand this photograph?
• Who should see this photograph? Does the publication of a photo like this help the people pictured in it?
• How would you describe the expression on the face of the man turned toward the viewer? What might he be thinking about?
• Would the meaning of this picture change if several of the men faced toward the camera, instead of just one? Explain your answer.
• Compare the dress and expression of the man who faces the camera with the appearance of the other men in the picture. Why has Lange singled him out?
• Where do you think Lange stood to take this picture?
• Can you find any patterns or repeating motifs? How do they contribute to the photograph's meaning?
• Do you think a person needs to have personally experienced unemployment and hunger to understand this photograph?
• Who should see this photograph? Does the publication of a photo like this help the people pictured in it?
Background Information - A crowd of men stands waiting, tightly packed together. Most of them have their backs to the camera, but one man in the foreground, with the brim of his hat covering his eyes, is turned toward the viewer. Leaning on a wooden rail, he tensely clasps his hands and balances an empty cup between his arms on top of the fence. All of the men pictured here were standing in a breadline organized during the Depression by a wealthy San Franciscan known as the "White Angel."
Lange's friends urged her to stay away from places like this, where unemployed and desperately poor people gathered. Nonetheless, one day in 1933 she ventured out from her portrait studio and created this image of the misery and passivity endured by the unemployed who wait for food as well as for a chance to get a job. She later described the experience, which proved to be a turning point in her understanding of what she could accomplish as a photographer: "That's the first day I ever made a photograph actually on the street. I put it on the wall of my studio and customers, people whom I was making portraits of, would come in and glance at them. And the only comment I ever got was, 'What are you going to do with this kind of thing?' I didn't know. But I knew that picture was on my wall, and I knew that it was worth doing." She later said that, soon after photographing White Angel Bread Line, "I'd begun to get a much firmer grip on the things I really wanted to do in my work."
Lange's friends urged her to stay away from places like this, where unemployed and desperately poor people gathered. Nonetheless, one day in 1933 she ventured out from her portrait studio and created this image of the misery and passivity endured by the unemployed who wait for food as well as for a chance to get a job. She later described the experience, which proved to be a turning point in her understanding of what she could accomplish as a photographer: "That's the first day I ever made a photograph actually on the street. I put it on the wall of my studio and customers, people whom I was making portraits of, would come in and glance at them. And the only comment I ever got was, 'What are you going to do with this kind of thing?' I didn't know. But I knew that picture was on my wall, and I knew that it was worth doing." She later said that, soon after photographing White Angel Bread Line, "I'd begun to get a much firmer grip on the things I really wanted to do in my work."
Pledge of Allegiance, Raphael Weill Elementary School, San Francisco, Dorothea Lange, April 1942• What is happening in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that?
• How would you describe the girl's expression? What do you think she might be feeling?
• Why do you think Lange chose to take a picture of a Japanese-American child reciting the "Pledge of Allegiance"?
• Why do you suppose Lange cropped the picture so that the Japanese-American girl is placed in the center?
• Does this photograph communicate a message or messages beyond the simple fact of a child's recitation of the "Pledge of Allegiance"? What message do you get from it?
• Do you recite or have you recited the "Pledge of Allegiance"? What does it mean to you? What do you think it meant to the girl in this photo?
Background Information - As far as Lange was concerned, her assignment from the United States government's War Relocation Authority (WRA) to document the Japanese-American evacuation process in northern California included picturing their lives in the San Francisco area before they were interned, as well as after. She made this image at a public school in April just days before citizens like this girl and her family were given numbers and transported to internment camps for the remainder of World War II. A group of schoolchildren are standing close together with their hands over their hearts and gazing upward, presumably at a flag. The image was cropped to draw attention to the girl in a plaid dress who stands front and center. Her expression is serious and shows strong emotion.
In Lange's words: "What I photographed was the procedure, the process of processing. I photographed the normal life insofar as I could. . . . I photographed . . . the Japanese quarter of San Francisco, the businesses they were operating, and the people as they were going to their YWCAs and YMCAs and churches and in their Nisei headquarters, all the baffled, bewildered people. . . ."
Although Lange undertook this photographic work on behalf of the United States government, it is clear that her sympathies were with the Japanese Americans. Many fellow WRA photographers attempted to present the internment in a positive light; Lange did not hesitate to convey the unfathomable injustice of Executive Order 9066.
Stoop Labor in Cotton Field, San Joaquin Valley, California, Dorothea Lange, 1938
• What can you say about how Lange framed her subject?• How do you think the man is feeling? What do you see in the picture that gives you clues about this?
• How would you describe the mood of this picture? Would this picture have a different mood if the top half were filled by the sky?
• Why do you think that Lange chose not to clearly show the man's face?
• What do you think this man will do after the cotton-picking season has ended?
• Have you ever picked a crop in a field? What was it like?
Background Information - A man is shown stooped over in a field of cotton. The horizon line is high, making the worker appear monumental as he goes about his work in the strong sunlight. The bag he is dragging looks very heavy. Yet Lange's photograph makes the difficult, exhausting work look graceful, and the coarse cloth of his overalls and heavy bag seem to crease and hang in beautiful ways.
In the revised and expanded edition of An American Exodus (1969), this picture is accompanied by a caption from Paul Taylor's field notes: "Migratory cotton pickers paid 75 cents per 100 pounds. A good day's pick is 200 pounds. CIO union strikers demand $1 per 100 pounds." Workers who were paid by the day lacked job security and were forced to move their families again and again in search of work.
The work of picking cotton occupies a chapter of John Steinbeck's 1939 book about migrant life in California, The Grapes of Wrath. Like other seasonal labor, it was a possibility for his Joad family, who had fled the Dust Bowl conditions of Oklahoma. In a conversational style, seemingly from the migrant picker's viewpoint, Steinbeck describes the process: "Now the bag is heavy, boost it along. Set your hips and tow it along, like a work horse. And the kids pickin' into the old man's sack. Good crop here. Gets thin in the low places, thin and stringy. Never seen no cotton like this here California cotton."
The work of picking cotton occupies a chapter of John Steinbeck's 1939 book about migrant life in California, The Grapes of Wrath. Like other seasonal labor, it was a possibility for his Joad family, who had fled the Dust Bowl conditions of Oklahoma. In a conversational style, seemingly from the migrant picker's viewpoint, Steinbeck describes the process: "Now the bag is heavy, boost it along. Set your hips and tow it along, like a work horse. And the kids pickin' into the old man's sack. Good crop here. Gets thin in the low places, thin and stringy. Never seen no cotton like this here California cotton."
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