Beyond Documentary
February 10, 2025
When it comes to migration and photography, it is impossible not to think of Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’, taken during her time working for the Resettlement Administration, a government agency formed to provide aid to migrant farmers who had been driven west by the devastations of the Great Depression.
As the story goes, Lange was driving through Nipomo, California, in 1936 when she saw a sign reading, “PEA-PICKERS CAMP”, and decided to turn back. There, she met the then 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson and her seven children, and took seven photographs of them, one which would become immortalised as her most famous work.
Her intimate portrayal, combined with Thompson’s fierce gaze – which seems to stare past us onto something beyond our view – has created a timeless image, attesting to the desire of the photographer to discover the internal force which allows one to find strength at the most difficult times.
While Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ continues to represent the history of hardships faced by those in the U.S. and beyond who are forced to migrate, the work of South African artist Katharine Cooper documents the lives of those who choose – or are forced – to return home, after the devastating effects of a natural or human-made disaster.
From October 2015 on Cooper made several journeys to Syria with the support of SOS Chrétiens d’Orient, a young French organisation which works to rehabilitate the Middle Eastern populations affected by the war. There, she visited ruined cities such as Ma’aloula and Aleppo to capture the atmosphere of these places, ravaged by multiple attacks, and created the series ‘Aleppo mon Amour’ (2017-2018).
Cooper, known for depicting women, men, and children with a great form of respect and sensitivity, saw beyond the disaster. What she discovered in these scorched regions was a determined life-force. In Aleppo, she found men covered with the dust of reconstruction, wrecks of lorries transformed into kiosks by merchants, children who took care of animals as beloved companions.
As a result, Cooper’s black and white portraits show us the world beyond newspaper photographs, focussing on what matters in the everyday life of the people she spends time with. Her works ‘Khalid and his Donkey (II) in Old Aleppo’, just as ‘Hussein with his Birdcage’ (exhibited at Rotterdam’s Fenix Museum of Migration), remind us that in times of hardship the love for animals can be a life saving comfort – an internal force which allows one to find strength at the most difficult times.