“Migrant Mother,” by Dorothea Lange | National Museum of American History.
What happened to the Migrant Mother?
Florence died of “stroke, cancer and heart problems” at Scotts Valley, California, on September 16, 1983 at age 80. She was buried in Lakewood Memorial Park, in Hughson, California, and her gravestone reads: “FLORENCE LEONA THOMPSON Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood.”
What does the Migrant Mother photo represent?
From the moment it first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco newspaper in March 1936, the image known as “Migrant Mother” came to symbolize the hunger, poverty and hopelessness endured by so many Americans during the Great Depression.
What did the Migrant Mother do to earn money?
Even after her children bought her a house, she chose to live in a trailer. … Her children, unable to pay the hospital, used her identity as the Migrant Mother to raise $15,000 in donations. The money helped to defray Thompson’s medical bills, but Thompson herself gained nothing. She died soon after her stroke.
What made the photo of the migrant mother so powerful?
The image of a worried but resilient mother was so powerful that it prompted the government to send 20,000 pounds of food to relieve starvation in a migrant worker camp. It may have also helped inspire John Steinbeck’s literary classic The Grapes of Wrath. That’s a picture that’s certainly worth another thousand words.
How did the Migrant Mother image change the world?
Migrant Mother went on to become the public face of the Dust Bowl migrants; help win Lange a Guggenheim fellowship in 1941; adorn U.S. postage stamps; and inspire John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
What made the photo of the migrant mother so powerful quizlet?
What made the photo of the Migrant Mother so powerful? It made people feel sympathy for the migrants.
Is Migrant Mother art or documentation?
Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is widely recognized as the most popular social documentary photograph of all time. During the course of her 40-year career, Lange’s style as a photographer proposed that social documentary photography is a humanist art form.
What was a migrant worker in the 1930s?
The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a period of drought that destroyed millions of acres of farmland, forces white farmers to sell their farms and become migrant workers who travel from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages.
How did the government response to migrant mother?
Ask students how they 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. noticing the details in the figures of the woman and the children.
Was the Migrant Mother staged?
Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is certainly one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century. And just as the photo is striking, so is the story behind it. … In one of the improvised tents, she spotted Florence Owens Thompson, who became the subject of her iconic image – and five other attempts before it.
Do these photographs affect your understanding of Lange’s Migrant Mother as evidence of the past?
2. Do these photographs affect your understanding of Lange’s “Migrant Mother” as evidence of the past? … They make the original photo much more believable as evidence on how conditions really were in the Dust Bowl.