The filmmaker Errol Morris has been writing an interesting series of blog posts on the New York Times site over the past few years. The most recent series, brilliantly named “The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock” (an Edward Gorey title if ever I heard one) focuses on the photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration in the USA during the Great Depression—photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein.

The iconic works of these photographers have long fascinated me, as they’ve become the defining images of the Dust Bowl and Depression-era America. In his articles, Errol Morris explores the “truth” behind these photographs (and documentary photography in general) by ruminating on such topics as manipulation and perceived manipulation, the fine lines between documentary, propaganda and art, and how “true” things may be manipulated in a way that does not negate their truth so much as amplify it in order for that truth to be more believable and effective for the viewer.

It’s all fairly long-winded, but it’s interesting nonetheless, particularly in how it sheds light on the creation of some of the more famous FSA photographs. What really caught my attention was the last article in the series, which mostly comprises a discussion with a man named Bill Ganzel who, in the 1970s, revisted and rephotographed many of the locations and people depicted in the FSA photographs from 1930s. His photos were subsequently published in a book called Dust Bowl Descent, which includes an updated picture of “Migrant Mother” Florence Thompson, probably one of the most famous faces in American photography:

This picture by Dorothea Lange has intrigued me for years, largely because it is a single image which seems to capture a lifetime of experience and hardship. The follow-up picture by Bill Ganzel—which shows Florence at the age of 75, sitting in a leafy suburban garden surrounded by her adult daughters—reveals that Lange’s picture doesn’t show a lifetime of experience after all. It doesn’t even show half a lifetime of experience, since Florence Thompson was 32 when the “Migrant Mother” picture was taken and 80 when she died. Bill Ganzel acknowledges this, and seems to express ambivalence about the effect of his own picture, when he says, “When I take my photograph up against the iconic depiction of desperation […] it changes the meaning. […] It negates the desperation.”

I’m not sure it does negate the desperation, but it certainly puts a different perspective on it, and it seems to prove Errol Morris’ point that photographs can manipulate reality by the very fact of their existence (inasmuch as the follow-up photo of Florence Thompson changes how we perceive Florence Thompson in the “Migrant Mother” photo).

In the end, though, both photographs of Florence Thompson, the one from 1936 and the one from 1979, are equally real and equally “true”, and I think the “Migrant Mother” image retains its power as a symbol of poverty and hardship, as well as determination and dignity.

A selection of some of the most popular FSA photographs can be found on Flickr, and nearly 200,000 other photographs and negatives can be viewed online on the Library of Congress website.