Wandering: Aborted

I recently RSVPed that I would like to attend an event hosted by the New York Public Library (for which registration was required). The event was for an author who wrote a biography of Dorthea Lange, a Depression-era photographer mostly known for her famous picture (series of pictures, really), Migrant Mother.

I saw these photgraphs years ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Since then, I've been aware of references to Dorthea Lange in various media.  I think there's controversy around the pictures - speculation they were posed, Lange took advantage of the subjects, etc.  I was hoping to learn more about Lange and these pictures this past Thursday but I couldn't make it.  I was asked to move a interview from 3/15 to Friday.  This meant leaving New York Thursday night.

So, I still have questions about Lange and the pictures. I guess I'll have to do some research on my own to answer my questions.  With just a cursory search, I learned that the woman in the picture above was named Florence Owens Thompson.  I was stunned to learn she was only 32 years old when the picture was taken.

The picture was taken in February or March 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange said the following related related to this series of pictures,

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

            From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960

The publisher website of this new Dorthea Lange biography (Dorthea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon), states

Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.

This quotation, and the pictures, really speak to me.  In a very convoluted way, they contribute to my misgivings about the job for which I interviewed.  I know that might not make much sense, but it makes a world of sense to me.  I am fully aware, however, that I have the luxury of having these misgivings - a luxury that Florence Owens Thompson never had.