Introduction

It is after six o’clock on a sunny June evening in Luton, a town 30 miles north of London, UK, in 2013. I am in a downstairs room of a small dilapidated Victorian terraced house on a street where many houses have boarded-up windows. Two social workers, Sarah and Rodney, are sitting on chairs near the doorway that separates this small room from the other downstairs room, which is being used a bedroom. Catalina, a migrant mother from Romania who arrived four months earlier with her family to find work, sits on her low stool next to the kitchen. Her long skirt flows onto the floor. She has seven children who were born in Stuttgart, Brussels and Buenos Aires. Radu, her husband, sits opposite her with the best view of the kitchen, the back door, and of the large TV, precariously placed on a window sill, that is playing Nicolae Guță, a popular Manele...

Lange, Dorothea (1895–1965)

Dorothea Lange is best known as a documentary photographer for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) during the 1930s. Her photographs are often characterized by an empathetic focus on individuals as representatives of larger social conditions. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, her work increased awareness of economic and environmental disasters in order to garner public and governmental support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal relief agencies. Lange’s most famous photograph, Migrant Mother (1936), depicts a woman and three of her children at a pea picker’s camp in Nipomo, California. Although the family is clearly destitute, dirty, and hungry, the mother’s gaze makes her appear resolute and hopeful, as if she is envisioning her own survival. Lange also documented the Japanese internment camps of the Second World War, created photo essays for Life magazine, and was the first woman photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. She died of oesophageal cancer in 1965.

História e narrativa fotográfica: o caso de “Migrant Mother”, de Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange, fotógrafa documentarista, fez uma série de fotos em 1936 sobre uma família de trabalhadores migrantes. A principal dessas fotos foi denominada “Migrant Mother” e tornou-se um ícone dos tempos da grande depressão. O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a produção do conhecimento histórico a partir dessa série de imagens e da experiência de Florence Thompson, a mulher que foi fotografada. Ao fazer isto tentarei problematizar a narrativa fotográfica e alguns dos procedimentos de Lange à luz da história e do ofício do historiador.