What the Migrant Mother Can Teach Us About Creativity

Migrant Mother

IMHO this is one of the greatest documentary photographs ever taken. It’s by Dorothea Lange and was part of a much larger project to record life amid the dust bowl during the Great Depression. The image was of Florence Owens Thompson and her kids, and became known as ‘Migrant mother’.

Dorothea had a strategy when it came to making images like this one. It was very simple and has a lot to teach any of us engaged in any kind of creative pursuit ...

"To know ahead of time what you are looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.”

Dorothea was completely open to whatever she discovered on the road. She didn’t go looking for a particular image, she let the images find her.

The less we fixate on an expected outcome and the more we trust the process, the likelier it is that the outcome will exceed our expectations.

Dorothea Lange