Photo Prompt

thompson_water_06_MSTR.mp3

TEACHERS: Feel free to use any of these pictures. We apologize that the source info is not present. They have been obtained under creative commons licensing and we will endeavor to have cites. To select a photo to put in your exercise, save the photo you want to your desktop, by clicking on it, then clicking "download original."

Choose one of these photos. Look at it closely by clicking on it to make it better. Then create a blog entry (TIP: Hover your mouse over the 'Blog Entry' link and RIGHT click it and select 'Open in a new Tab' so you can have your blog on one tab and your photo on another.

Write a story, poem, essay or reflection on the photo you have chosen. You have seven minutes to write, so don't do much self-editing. Just think of what you want to do and go. This exercise is good to help you understand the importance of just getting the idea out -- without worrying about spelling or where you'll end up or, even, whether you will finish.

After you are completed, please comment on two other students' pieces, telling them what engaged you, what you wondered about and, even, what you'd like them to expand.

If you chose the Migrant Mother photo by Dorothea Lange, listen to the podcast after you write to hear from the woman pictures many years later. The photo was taken in 1936.

Some more info on the Migrant Mother photo taken in 1936 by Dorothea Lange. Lange said she spent only 10 minutes in this particular camp and never got the woman's name. This was not normally the way Lange operated; she normally stayed a while and got everyone's name.

Lange's comments about this picture in 1960:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. 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.

The woman pictured is Florence Owen Thompson, born 1903 and died 1983. She was 32 in this picture. Here is a transcript of the short interview in the podcast:

"I left Oklahoma in 1925 and went to Oroville [California]. That's where them three girls' dad [Cleo] died, in Oroville, 1931. And I was 28 years old [in 1931], and I had five kids and that one [the baby in this photo, Norma] was on the road. She never even saw her daddy. She was born after he died. It was very hard. And cheap. I picked cotton in Firebaugh, when that girl there was about two years old, I picked cotton in Firebaugh for 50-cents a hundred."
     Question: "A 'hundred' [meaning] weight?"
     "A hundred pounds."
     Question: "How much could you pick in a day, then?"
     "I generally picked around 450, 500. I didn't even weigh a hundred pounds. I lived down there in Shafter, and I'd leave home before daylight and come in after dark. We just existed! Anyway, we lived. We survived, let's put it that way. I walked from what they called a Hoover camp ground right there at the bridge [in Bakersfield], I walked from there to way down on First Street, and worked at a penny a dish down there for 50-cents a day and the leftovers. Yeah, they give me what was leftover to take home with me. Sometimes, I'd carry home two water buckets full.
     "Well, [in 1936] we started from L.A. to Watsonville. And the timing chain broke on my car. And I had a guy to pull into this pea camp in Nipomo. I started to cook dinner for my kids, and all the little kids around the camp came in. 'Can I have a bite? Can I have a bite?' And they was hungry, them people was. And I got my car fixed, and I was just getting ready to pull out when she [Dorothea Lange] come back and snapped my picture.
     "I come to this town [Modesto] in 1945. I transferred from Whittier State to Modesto. And when this hospital opened up out here, I went to work there. And the first eight years I lived in this town, I worked 16 hours out of 24. Eight-and-a-half years, seven days a week."
     Question: "Are you comfortable now?"
     "Yeah."