Portraits of an Era

1. Set Focus
Pose this essential question: Why is photography a powerful medium for bringing about change?

2. List Vocabulary
Share some of the challenging vocabulary words in the article. Encourage students to use context to infer meanings as they read.

• plight (p. 18)
• makeshift (p. 19)
• scavenging (p. 19)
• empathetic (p. 19)
• implementing (p. 21)
• undimmed (p. 21)

3. Engage
Have students examine the photo Migrant Mother on page 19 of the magazine. Ask: Why do you think this photo taken by Dorothea Lange is iconic? At the end of the lesson, have students add to their thoughts on why the photo is iconic.

4. Read and Discuss
Ask students to read the Upfront article about Dorothea Lange. Review why the article is a secondary source. (It was written by someone who didn’t personally experience or witness the events.) Then pose these critical-thinking questions and ask students to cite text evidence when answering them:

• Why did many people in the U.S. face economic hardship in the 1930s? (The U.S. stock market crashed in 1929, beginning a decade-long global economic downturn. Businesses closed. Banks closed. People lost their jobs and life savings. In the Great Plains of the U.S., farms began to fail as the price of wheat plummeted. The plight of farmers was exacerbated when drought hit the region, creating the Dust Bowl. Hundreds of thousands of people migrated west to California, but jobs there were scarce as well.)

• What was Dorothea Lange’s job when she took the photo of Florence Owens Thompson? How did she happen to take Thompson’s photo? (Lange was working for the Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.) when she took the photo. Like other F.S.A. photographers, Lange was tasked with documenting the suffering Americans were experiencing during the Depression. She was on her way home after weeks of taking photos when her instincts told her to turn back to a migrant workers’ camp she had passed. That’s where she photographed Thompson.)

• Examine Lange’s photos included with the article. What are some common themes in her photos? (Students’ responses will vary but should be supported by references to specific details in the photographs. Students may observe that the subjects are all people facing economic hardship who were photographed during moments in their lives, not in studios, providing insight into their struggles.)

• In the article, Linda Gordon says that Migrant Mother is not just a photographic record of a subject in the field but also a work of art. Do you agree? Explain. (Responses will vary, but students should support their ideas with details from the text, observations about Lange’s photograph, and their own knowledge about documentary and artistic photography.)

5. Use the Primary Source
Project, distribute, or assign in Google Classroom the PDF ‘We Survived,” which features a transcript of part of an interview with Florence Thompson­—the woman in Lange’s Migrant Mother. Discuss what makes the interview a primary source. (It provides firsthand evidence concerning the topic.) Have students read the transcript and answer the questions below (which appear on the PDF without answers).

• How would you describe Thompson’s tone and purpose in this part of the interview? (Thompson’s tone in this part of the interview can be described as straightforward and matter-of-fact. Her purpose is to tell about her life moving from place to place as she tried to survive and provide for her children during the Great Depression.)

• How many locations does Thompson mention? Based on the interview, why do you think she moved so often? (Thompson mentions 10 locations. [NOTE: Students may mention fewer or more locations depending on whether they include places where she worked but did not live.] Thompson probably moved often to find work. For example, when the season for picking cotton ended, she would have still needed money, so she probably left for Bakersfield to find a new job.)

• What idea does Thompson convey about her life when she talks about how she and her family “just existed”? (She conveys the idea that life was very hard for her and her family. Like other migrant families, they just existed, they lived, they survived—but they had no real joy, interesting pursuits, or probably even any hope that their lives would one day improve.)

• How do the details Thompson provides about the jobs she did support the idea that her life was hard? (The details about leaving before daylight, picking 450 to 500 pounds of cotton, and coming home after dark show that Thompson worked long, physically demanding days and was probably often exhausted. The information about being paid in leftovers suggests that she and her family were in dire need of food.)

• Lange wrote of her 1930s photos: “I am trying here to say something about the despised, the defeated . . . the helpless, the rootless, the dislocated.” Based on the Upfront article, this primary source, and Lange’s photos, what do you think Lange was trying to say? (Students’ responses will vary but should be supported with text evidence and observations about the photos included with the article.)

6. Writing Prompt
A common saying is “A picture is worth a thousand words.” What does that saying mean? Do Lange’s photographs and the effect they had support this point of view? Explain in a brief essay.

7. Quiz
Use the quiz to assess comprehension.

8. Classroom Debate
Lange told the children how to pose. Does this make a photo less of a documentary photo?

9. Visual Analysis
Have students go to loc.gov to research photographs taken by Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Marion Post Wolcott while they worked for the F.S.A. Students should pick one photo to share with the class and explain what they found interesting or powerful about the photograph.