Chapter 1 Visual: “Migrant Mother” photo by Dorothea Lange
Photographer Dorothea Lange took this iconic photo, widely known as “Migrant Mother,” in 1936 during the Great Depression after the Dust Bowl that impoverished and displaced many Americans. The official notes read: “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.” Lange took this photo while working for the Resettlement Administration, a government agency whose photographic work aimed both to record the reality of poverty (thereby defining it), but also to construct arguments about the success of government interventions. Lange commented on this photo in Popular Photography in February 1960: “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.” Does this photo frame Florence Owens and her children as the deserving or the undeserving poor?
Greg Kaufmann
- Greg Kaufmann video on Bill Moyers “The Truth About American Poverty” (June 28, 2013)
Rector and Sheffield
- “Chart of the Week: How America’s Poor Can Still Be Rich in Stuff”
- “Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off, but Far Behind”
- Stephen Colbert on the Rector and Sheffield Report
Poverty Then and Now
- NPR “The Changing Picture of Poverty: Hard Work Is ‘Just Not Enough.'” (7 May 2014). Gives an overview of what poverty looks like today, arguing that there are some advances in material goods, but the poor might be more isolated than ever.
Census Poverty Data: Infographics Make a Difference
- Library of Census Data Infographics–many on poverty
- In-Class Assignment: Teachers, to discuss visual literacy, try giving one group of students this Census Bureau infographic on How Census Measures Poverty and this textual equivalent version with exactly the same data. Give the two groups the same amount of time and then quiz them on what they remember. Discuss how the visual design and affordances of those documents might have had something to do with what and how much they can recall.