THE OUTLAWZ ANYTHING GOES EXCEPT CARDZ ART CHALLENGE

 THEME: WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY DAY

"Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion...

the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate."

                                        ...Dorothea Lange

Several years ago, I posted a story about Dorothea Lange complete with my own digital art on my blog, Free Trinkets and Treasures. Since this art challenge is about World Photography, I thought I would post some excerpts from the article to honor this woman and her lifelong dedication in using her talent to bring public awareness of the human condition and suffering during the Great Depression years. 

Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. From 1935 to 1939, Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten —particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families and migrant workers — to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era. 

Lange's best-known picture is titled 

"Migrant Mother."

The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson

 

 Lange spoke about taking the photograph:

"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 family 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 to 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."

On December 15, 2008, Dorothea Lange was inducted into the California Hall Of Fame, located at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. Her son accepted the honor in her place.

                                

                           Dorothea is quoted as saying:

"The best way to go into unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else's requirement but your own."

             

      "The visual life is an enormous undertaking,  

                        practically unattainable."