Dorothea Lange was a second generation German immigrant born in New Jersey in the USA if 1895.
One of Dorothea’s most famous images is ‘Migrant Mother’ taken in 1936 of a mother affected by the great depression. Lange was working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), who commissioned the images, giving the photographers a list of images they wanted them to get. The FSA section head who commissioned the images described it as ‘the’ image of the FSA and that he often wondered what she was thinking.
Florence Thompson’ the woman in the image later complained that she never earned a penny from the picture. However, although she didn’t directly benefit at the time, the image did lead to food aid being sent to the camp. In her essay; In, Around and Afterthoughts, Matha Rosler, argues that Mrs Thompson was justified in feeling aggrieved. . . she says that documentary photographs have two moments:
- arguing for or against the social issue it portrays and seeking to persuade change.
- the artistic value as a piece of art or as she calls it ‘aesthetic “rightness”.
It seems that she argues that the image becomes more about the photographer than the content and that the photographers don’t have ‘sympathy’ for the real world, but are only concerned with the aesthetics.
This resonates when compared with the Citizen Journalism which in the main is taken by those involved or suffering from a given situation.
References:
la, A., 2005. Basic Critical Theory for Photographers. Elsevier Science.
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange