Poverty Porn

‘Migrant Mother’ is one of the most famous images in the world taken from a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in 1936. I have been reminded of it during a shoot with Karin a victim and survivor of child sexual abuse and viewing an archive portrait of a mother and child discussed recently with Guardian Weekend Magazine picture editor Kate Edwards.

I suppose I am comparing the literal starvation and suffering of Lange’s subject with the emotional malnourishment I felt from my contemporary sitters.

Migrant Mother resonates with contemporary society more so now during our own version of what depression is but our austerity is only felt by those not often placed in the spotlight and when we do see those who suffer, they are often categorized as somehow complicit in their plight. My images of the underclass in this country as represented here by the image of a mother and child (below), shot for the notorious ‘Benefit Street/CH4’ have been accused of objectifying poverty, whilst the same images of suffering from abroad seem more palatable. Perhaps we are a little uncomfortable facing up to the reality that there is genuine poverty here (literally and emotionally) when we appear to have so much and we are often quoted as being the 5^th largest economy in the world.

Update 24/09/2018 after Barbican retrospective 'Politics of Seeing'  - Lange was commissioned by the visual encyclopaedia of American life in order to promote the New Deal, the images were presented in context of a single narrative to persuade the country of a political argument. The plight of white Americans particularly shocked the country and contributed to change. The images of the hardship of white people only previously reserved for 'other communities' must have been shocking at the time. The focus on white as opposed to the expectation of black suffering in images, I suggest, drew attention to the plight of the country in a way that images of other races would not. The tragedy here is in the expectation of the representation of black poverty in images as 'not as shocking' as white. The humiliation is real and exaggerated if the expectation that as white you have an inherent advantage. Lange is not so brutally objective and her politics masks this unique image of white humiliation with some sympathy and is presented by curators as 'stoicism' but I suggest the expression in Migrant Mother is despair.

I wonder how this would be received now. The definition of 'poverty porn' (an accusation levelled at my work) is "any type of media, be it written, photographed or filmed, which exploits the poor's condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers or increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause". End

Sometimes I am brought into contact with an emotion exuding from a subject that is so powerful and complex it changes the physical nature of the space in that moment. As they face the camera there is an exchange of mutual needs; to be seen and recorded. I never quite know when it will occur but it is the Holy Grail.

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet.” – Dorothea Lange.

Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, 1936

Mother & Daughter, from Benefit Street/CH4 © Richard Ansett 2014

Karin with Cat © Richard Ansett 2016