MADONNA WSPÓŁCZESNOŚCI – MIGRANT MOTHER, CZYLI MATKA TUŁACZKA. ANALIZA IKONOGRAFICZNA

In this article I would like to present an iconographic analysis of the Migrant Mother, a photograph by Dorothea Lange, in the context of social change in the United States of the 1930s. For this purpose I use appropriate tools and the theories of Klaus Rieser, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Roland Barthes. I also read and interpret Lange’s photograph from the feminist perspective. In this article the Migrant Mother thus constitutes a fascinating object of academic inquiry, as well as a starting point for the deliberations on the harsh words of Jean Baudrillard who said: “You assume you are photographing a given thing for your own pleasure, but in fact it wants its picture taken and you are only a figure in its staging, secretly moved by the self-advertising perversion of the surrounding world (...) All metaphysics is swept away by this reversal of situation in which the subject is no longer master of the representation, but merely a function of the world's objective irony”. I try to polemicize with the words of Baudrillard, “the high priest of postmodernism” analyzing the Migrant Mother.