Who was the photographer who took photographs of migrant workers?
Dorothea Lange
What photographer took the famous Migrant Mother picture during the Great Depression?
What did Dorothea Lange photograph?
What is Dorothea Lange known for? Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography. Her most famous portrait is Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936).
What did Dorothea Lange do prior to working for the government?
From 1917-1919, Lange started out as an independent portrait photographer in San Francisco, but soon began photographing the homeless in order to bring attention to their plight. In 1935, she joined the Farm Security Administration and reported on living conditions in rural areas.
Who was Dorothea Lange and how did the Dust Bowl impact her work?
In the 1930s, Lange worked for a government program that documented relief sent to farmers who had been hit hard by the collapse of the U.S. economy. Her images of desperately poor families told the stories of those who had been unfortunate. They also drew the sympathy and support of the American public.
What was the main cause of the Dust Bowl?
The Dust Bowl was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economics and other cultural factors. After the Civil War, a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains.
How did Dorothea Lange impact the world?
Her photographs clearly documented the negative effects of the Depression on Americans, particularly the rural poor and migrant farmworkers. Lange’s work was powerful in its effort to portray the personal side of the Depression’s misery, as the individual families she worked with humanized the national crisis.
How did Migrant Mother 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 stopped the Dust Bowl?
While the dust was greatly reduced thanks to ramped up conservation efforts and sustainable farming practices, the drought was still in full effect in April of 1939. In the fall of 1939, rain finally returned in significant amounts to many areas of the Great Plains, signaling the end of the Dust Bowl.
Is the term Okie offensive?
“Okie” is defined as “a migrant agricultural worker; esp: such a worker from Oklahoma” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary). The term became derogatory in the 1930s when massive migration westward occurred.
What happened to Okies in California?
Many years ago, the weather in Oklahoma went haywire, the rain stopped, dust storms blew away the top soil, crops failed, farmers couldn’t pay their mortgages, and Okies fled to the promised land of California in a migration that has been compared to the biblical story of Exodus.
Where did Okies settle in California?
This migration began in earnest in 1935 and peaked between 1937 and 1938. When the migrants got to Barstow, California, they had to decide whether to follow Highway 66 into Los Angeles or turn north toward California’s central agricultural valleys. Some 38 percent of the southwestern migrants chose Los Angeles.
Was the nickname Okies positive or negative?
In the early twentieth century people from Oklahoma were occasionally nicknamed “Okies,” a special appellation that seemed a natural shortening of the state’s name. With the publication of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, however, “Okie” took on negative connotations.
What are Okies and Arkies?
The migrants included people from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico, but were all referred to as “Okies” and “Arkies.” More of the migrants were from Oklahoma than any other state, and a total of 15% of the Oklahoma population left for California.
Which states were impacted by the Dust Bowl?
Although it technically refers to the western third of Kansas, southeastern Colorado, the Oklahoma Panhandle, the northern two-thirds of the Texas Panhandle, and northeastern New Mexico, the Dust Bowl has come to symbolize the hardships of the entire nation during the 1930s.
How were farmers affected in the Dust Bowl?
The massive dust storms caused farmers to lose their livelihoods and their homes. Deflation from the Depression aggravated the plight of Dust Bowl farmers. Prices for the crops they could grow fell below subsistence levels. In 1932, the federal government sent aid to the drought-affected states.
Where did the farmers go during the Dust Bowl?
In the 1930s, farmers from the Midwestern Dust Bowl states, especially Oklahoma and Arkansas, began to move to California; 250,000 arrived by 1940, including a third who moved into the San Joaquin Valley, which had a 1930 population of 540,000. During the 1930s, some 2.5 million people left the Plains states.
How many farmers left the Dust Bowl?
In the rural area outside Boise City, Oklahoma, the population dropped 40% with 1,642 small farmers and their families pulling up stakes. The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California.
What crops caused the Dust Bowl?
And economic pressures in the late 1920s pushed farmers on the Great Plains to plow under more and more native grassland. Farmers had to have more acres of corn and wheat to make ends meet. them into the air, until the entire field was blowing away. The result was the Dust Bowl.
How did overproduction cause the Dust Bowl?
Economic depression coupled with extended drought, unusually high temperatures, poor agricultural practices and the resulting wind erosion all contributed to making the Dust Bowl. However, overproduction of wheat coupled with the Great Depression led to severely reduced market prices.
What was it like living in the Dust Bowl?
Life during the Dust Bowl years was a challenge for those who remained on the Plains. They battled constantly to keep the dust out of their homes. Windows were taped and wet sheets hung to catch the dust. The cutting dust caused “dust pneumonia” which sometimes killed the very young and the very old.
How was the Dust Bowl a man made disaster?
The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster. Lured by record wheat prices and promises by land developers that “rain follows the plow,” farmers powered by new gasoline tractors over-plowed and over-grazed the southern Plains.