Dorothea Lange And Walker Evans: Photography In The Great Depression

Photography in the Great Depression: Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans

Aarushi Satish

During the times of the Great Depression, the techniques and materials used to capture a photo were not nearly as advanced as today. However, photography was still looked at as a form of art, just as it is today, and it even succeeded through the tough times of the 1930s. Photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, were hired by the Farm Security Administration, a government agency, to document farmers and their living conditions during the Great Depression. These photographs helped raise a feeling of sympathy and encouraged other people to help when and where they could but sometimes over exaggerated the amount

Lange decided to take up photography after taking an internship in the NYC art studios. In the 1930s, Lange decided to join the FSA. In the next five years she traveled the country documenting rural hardship. The iconic photograph, “Migrant Mother” communicates the paralyzing fear that was widely acknowledged to be a defining characteristic of the depression and experienced by many Americans irrespective of income. By depicting what was known to be a generalized anxiety within the specific form of a woman’s body, that emotion is both made real and constrained by conventional attributions of her surroundings. The migrant mother was a photograph that defined the great depression.The photograph helped reveal the cost of the disaster on human lives but this was falsely misrepresented. The migrant mother sends a message to the people as if none of the lower class had houses or food to eat. Florence Owens Thompson ,the woman who was photographed by Dorothea Lange, was in a situation that was very rare. Not everyone is in the same situation as this woman but the photograph showed that it shocked the U.S. government into providing relief for the millions of other families devastated by the Depression(Robert Hariman and John Louis