DESIGN: NEVER FORGET WHAT THE BIG MEN TOOK FROM YOU

I whipped up this piece last year after studying a lot of Dorothea Langes work, a Depression-era photographer most famously known for this piece:

Migrant Mother, taken by Doretha Lange 1936

I find her work encapsulates a wholesome sort of compassion, it almost feels motherly. You feel such a deep empathy with her work— I imagine it’s a watered down version that Lange felt as she experienced these shots firsthand. Something kind of cool I found out about her is that she credited a lot of her career & worldview was her surviving polio during childhood, which left her with a limp for the rest of her life— definitely a cool lady with some cool work.

I played off the text in one of Lange’s shots coming up with the phrase “Never forget what the big men took from you.”

I couldn’t necessarily explain what I mean by those words because it’s difficult to put into words. But I can feel what I’m trying to say when I say them to myself— I feel something very similar to that of Sidney Lumit when he delivers his “I’m as mad as hell & I’m not gonna take this anymore!” monologue in Network.

They robbed us of our freedom & we let it happen.