Documenting the Depression:
The FSA photographers and Rural Poverty
The Great Depression fell hard in the year of 1935 bringing what seemed to some people the end of the world. But in truth, the Great Depression was nothing near the end of the world, in fact the year of 1935 was not the first year nor was it the last year that many families had suffered and went hungry due to lack of work. Families forced to leave their home. Children going in hunger while their bellies pierced with pain. Mothers trying desperately to keep the family together while holding the brunt of the problems due to the depression. The husbands feeling the guilt for not having a job and thinking that it is his fault. Children scream with lack of food and sheer boredom as the families pack their bags and head towards California in hopes to find work and the start of a new life. This is a painted picture of what one might have saw during the Great Depression. However, we need not imagine what it might have been like. What pictures might have looked like because we already know.
Photography was a technological advance during the nineteenth century and although not many people had cameras, the ones that did, did not miss the opportunity to capture the cruel times of that period. In John Vachon’s picture taken in 1940, he shows an abandoned farmhouse in Ward County, North Dakota. Vachon also takes a picture of the living quarters of a fruit packing home for the workers in Berrien, Michigan in 1940. The small confinements of the house could barely suit one person let alone a whole family. Dorothea Lang, another photographer of that time shots photos of a migrant mother in Nipomo, California in 1936. Her face stern and wrinkled. A look of sadness and concern appears on her tired face while her two children cling on to her shoulder. She also took a picture of a Mexican migrant workers home in Imperial Valley, California in 1937. His home is merely anymore than a small bedroom. A shack made out of cardboard and what appears to be aluminum. Once again, hardly set for one person let alone a family. These conditions were not anything unusual. Unfortunately, those were the times during the Great Depression and the photographers could not have captured them any better.
The Great Depression ended because of...
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..., North Carolina in 1939. That picture was taken by Marion Post Wolcott and it shows the owner neatly pressed wearing a black suit and hat smoking a cigar. Arthur Rothstein took another picture in 1940 that one also depicts an owner of a mule dealer in Creedmoor, North Carolina neatly pressed in a black suit only smoking a cigarette as opposed to a cigar. Those were the people who didn’t care that people were suffering, they didn’t care if they had no home and most of all, they didn’t care if children went hungry. They were in it for they money. So when I look at those pictures and think what the American middle class worker at that time would think, I hatefully have to say that they would not care one way or another. You win some, you lose some.
The Great Depression was a tragic era in history. To sum up the feelings and hard times that people had suffered through would be nearly impossible. But like I stated in the previous pages, the pictures tell no lies. The pictures cannot erase the expression on people’s faces or the appearance that portray. The evidence is in the pictures, it always has been and it will remain to do so until the end of time.
Grant Wood was a Regionalist artist who continually endeavored to capture the idyllic beauty of America’s farmlands. In 1930 he had been roaming through his hometown in Iowa searching for inspiration when he stumbled upon a house that left him spellbound. From this encounter came America’s iconic American Gothic. Not long after Wood’s masterpiece was complete the once ideal countryside and the people who tended to it were overcome by despair and suffering as the Great Depression came to be. It was a time of economic distress that affected nearly every nation. America’s stock market crashed in 1929 and by 1933 millions of Americans were found without work and consequently without adequate food, shelter, and other necessities. In 1935, things took a turn for the worst as severe winds and dust storms destroyed the southern Great Plains in the event that became known as the Dust Bowl. Farmers, who had been able to fall back on their crops during past depressions, were hit especially hard. With no work or way or other source of income, many farms were foreclosed, leaving countless families hungry and homeless. Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born man who had a deep passion for social injustice, captures the well-known hopelessness of the Great Depression through his photograph Rural Rehabilitation Client. Shahn and Wood use their art to depict the desperation of everyday farmers in America due to the terrors and adverse repercussions that the Great Depression incited.
The Great Depression is a time in the history of the United States that people have learned and gained knowledge from. Its harsh times and conflicts have been written about in books, seen in movies, talked about on radios, and told to families throughout the generations. Seeing how life was during the 1930s in the movie, The Cinderella Man, was a great eye opener to how the people of this time truly survived and kept their true humanity in times of havoc. The time of the 1930s should be an inspiration to the nation and cause many to do well and live life smart and prosperous.
The Great Depression was just that, great. It was a unique experience that America has only gone through once… or perhaps twice? Maybe the 2008 American economic crisis did not lead to a recession at all; maybe it led to a second Great Depression. Of course that’s utter insanity, because everything from the numbers to the feelings show that 2000-2010 was nothing like the twenties and thirties. Realistically the most recent American recession was a barnacle on the whale of the Great Depression. Children of the recession can confirm to you that very little was similar to their twenties brethren. There was no widespread disgrace and debilitating state off living, there was only mild annoyance.
The photographers of the Farming Security Administration contributed to modern times both educationally and visually. Photographers like Russell Lee took photographs that not only captured the lives of those who suffered greatly with the Great Depression hovering over them, but also the emotions that these people felt. Russell Lee, like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans found his opportunity to prosper during the Great Depression with his photographs that would document the average American life suffering the wrath of the Depression from either unemployment or lack of home or even both. ...
Watching films from the Great Depression era today, we can see how people survived and made a living during the crisis. Everyone’s common goal was to find work and would do whatever they could to be able to provide for their families and themselves. Work could be very demanding when trying to make a pretty penny. Some ways people made a living was by working in a factory, as shown in Chaplin’s Modern Times, or in a more dangerous way of the ...
The experiences of Americans during the Great Depression varied greatly. For most, the Great Depression was a time of hardships and trials. The way that people were tried were different though, some languished in a collapsed economy, while others had to struggle to make a living in the remote regions of the country.
Conceivably one of the most copied, iconic depression era images, as well as one of the single most popular stock photo images in the Corbis “Bettman collection” (Parente 2003), “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” neither brought fame nor fortune to the photographer that captured that moment in time that still brings an uneasy sense of acrophobic fear to it’s viewers. Charles Clyde Ebbets, born August 18th, 1905 in Alabama, never knew the popularity that this emblematic representation of the daredevil American steel worker, in the midst of the skyscraper-building boom of depression era New York, would eventually attain.
The Great Depression is known as the greatest time of recession in American history. Many factors contributed to this hard time. With the stock market boom in the 1920’s, our country was filled with optimism for the future. Although there were signs of problems to come former President Herbert Hoover was just as convinced as the nation that they were only going through a rough patch and would be back on their feet in no time. That was until the stock market crash of 1929, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression. The stock market crash led to bank and company failures. Many people became unemployed and had to leave their homes. Families also had to move away because of the drought that caused dust storms and ultimately the Dust Bowl. Soon enough, thousands were migrating to find jobs elsewhere. Eventually when former President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected into office, he presented America with “The New Deal,” the plan that would save America and bring the nation up and out of the recession.
Many Americans choose to forget the past brutalities of child labor. Unfortunately, the past does not disappear. Child labor did take place in the U.S. and the Carolina Cotton Mill photograph is a prominent witness. Lewis Wickes Hine is the artist behind this powerful photo, which was taken in the early 1900s (Dimock). Hine’s Carolina Cotton Mill embodies the struggle of child labor through the incorporation of situational information, artistic elements such as lines and space, and cultural values.
“There were no smiles. There were no tears either. Just the camaraderie of fellow-sufferers. Everybody wanted to tell his neighbor how much he had lost. Nobody wanted to listen. It was too repetitious a tale” (The New York Times, World History Book). The stock market crash was only one of many contributions leading up to the Great Depression. There were many economic and societal conditions that worsened throughout this time. Luckily there have been documentaries on the life that was lived by the people and how they got through it, just like the character in the movie Cinderella Man, Jim Braddock. Millions of Americans and even people across the globe were hit and somewhat effected by this tragic period in history.
The Great Depression is one of the worst time for America. Books, cartoons, and articles have been written about the people during the Depression and how they survived in that miserable period. For example, the book Bud not Buddy takes place in the time of the Great Depression. Bud is a ten year old orphan, who was on the run trying to find his dad. There are many feelings throughout the book like sadness and scarceness. There are many diverse tones in the book about what people were feeling at the time.
The great depression was a very sad and hard time. This was a time where people had little money, no available jobs and just had a hard time with everything. Many people had nd any way to make money whether it was cutting kid’s hair in neighborhood, picking fruit, selling iron cords house to house or even painting a house for 5 dollars. Even though this was a very hard time some people still had hope that things would get better. This was a really bad time until Franklin Roosevelt who was for the government supporting the Americans and not the other way around became president.
This photo of a mother, Florence Owens Thompson and her two young children called, Migrant Mother was taken in March of 1936, a date was not given. This photo was taken by a Dorothea Lange, a photographer who wanted to take pictures of all the bad things happening around her during the great depression. After being taken, this photo was then called, migrant mother.” The photo was taken at a pea picking plant in Nipomo, California. Florence allowed Dorothea to take this picture because she thought that it would help to show the difficulties of the working poor. Soon after the photo was taken, it was published in newspapers promoting the government to send food and aid to the people of Nipomo where the living condition were almost unbearable. Later in her life, Florence came to regret that this picture was ever taken because it made her seem very desperate, which is something that she didn’t want to be known as being. The black and white and the expression on the mother's face add
The Great Depression of the 1930s is a period of time that was highly influenced by social memory, in that the social status you had, your gender, occupation, etc meant that you experienced the Depression differently from the next person, your account was influenced by your social groups/status. It is generally acknowledged that the Great Depression was a period of immense suffering for most. Hence the name given to the period. However, for some, the Great Depression is seen as a time in history where many prospered, and some even see a boom in the economy. The three accounts "Age of Extremes ch3", "The Dawn of Affluence, Reading 13" and "Coping: Middle- and Upper-Class Women. Reading 14" all illustrate different points of view on the Great Depression.
The Great Depression was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downfall in the history of the United Sates. No event has yet to rival The Great Depression to the present day today although we have had recessions in the past, and some economic panics, fears. Thankfully the United States of America has had its shares of experiences from the foundation of this country and throughout its growth many economic crises have occurred. In the United States, the Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors ("The Great Depression."). In turn from this single tragic event, numerous amounts of chain reactions occurred.