Depression images

“Bad as it is, the world is potentially full of good photographs. But to be good, photographs have to be full of the world.” Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon In early March, 1936, Dorothea Lange drove past a sign reading, “PEA-PICKERS CAMP,” in Nipomo, California. At the time, she was working as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration (RA), a Depression-era government agency formed to raise public awareness of and provide aid to struggling farmers. Twenty miles down the road, Lange reconsidered and turned back to the camp, where she encountered a mother and her children. “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet,” she later recalled. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding field and birds that the children killed.” Pea Picker Family, California; by 1966, when the Museum held a retrospective of Lange’s work, it had acquired its current title, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. Lange had little interest in classifying her photographs as art: she made them to effect social change. Although she had led a successful career as a White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco, a photograph of a man turned away from the hungry crowd, his interlaced hands and set jaw often taken as representative of a collective despair. Lange became increasingly confident in her ability to use In early 1935, on Taylor’s recommendation, Lange began to work for the California State Emergency Relief Administration. That summ...

In the 1930s, under the auspices of what would become the Farm Security Administration, 10 photographers from different backgrounds–all white–were sent out to accomplish the task of documenting America in a time of great poverty. Some of the photographs from this project have become emblematic of this period. But what of the photographers who took them? Here’s who they were: Farmer walking in dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma circa 1936. Arthur Rothstein/Wikimedia Commons Rothstein was the first staff photographer for the FSA. A New Yorker by birth who had studied at Columbia university, he wanted to show the devastation of the Dust Bowl to people back east. “The aim [of photography] is to move people to action, to change or prevent a situation because it may be wrong or damaging, or to support or encourage one because it is beneficial,” he wrote in a 1986 book, as Government agent interviewing a prospective resettlement client in Garrett County, Maryland circa 1938. Theodor Jung/Library of Congress Jung was a graphic artist and draftsman as well as a photographer. He started shooting photographs for what was then called the Resettlement Administration in 1934, Prospective homesteaders in front of post office at United, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Circa 1935. Library of Congress Shahn was a painter and artist as well as a photographer who worked part-time for the FSA’s photography department. His interest in art led him to work with different kinds of cameras, s...