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Migrant Mother: Mealtime
In 1936, Dorothea Lange began working for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), a New Deal agency established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her initial assignment was to document the conditions of the Great Depression in the migrant farmworker communities of California. Although her work was documentary, Lange felt compelled to capture the humanity of the individuals she met. This approach comes through in her portraits of Florence Owens Thompson, the subject of the iconic photograph Migrant Mother (1936), which Lange captioned "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age 32."
Hung Liu, who based Migrant Mother: Mealtime on one of Lange's lesser-known images of Thompson, notes, "Lange tried to photograph as a form of protest: the truth, the real picture." And because Liu had experienced living -- and laboring -- in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, for her, bearing witness to Thompson's conditions struck a very familiar chord.
Oil on canvas, 2016
Collection of Michael Klein |