I'm sure you've all seen this photo before, but it's called "Migrant Mother" by Dorothea Lange in 1936.
The reason I chose this photo was because this portrait shows what life was like during the Great Depression. It depicts the poverty and hopelessness of the time period. Ragged clothes, holding children, hoping to make it day by day. To me, Florence Thompson's (the mother) face shows to me that she's thinking about how she's going to provide for her family and how she's going to overcome the hardships of living in this time period.
The photograph shows Thompson quite literally holding the weight of her family as two of her seven children burrow their faces into her sides and a baby, visibly caked with dirt, is sleeping in her arms. With the children’s faces turned away and Thompson as the focal point, it is impossible to miss the deep lines that pinch across her forehead as she stares off-camera, or the rips in her sleeve that exposes her forearm. (You cannot see their surroundings or any contextual clues to their lifestyle—like their ramshackle, makeshift living space, or the actual size of their large family.) It is an explicit representation of poverty that brings you uncomfortably close to a mother’s hardship and the will to survive during one of the most dire economic eras of American history.
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