As our economy reels in recession, the era of the Great Depression and New Deal takes on new immediacy. These days, in news media more often characterized by historical amnesia, pundits frequently invoke the 1930s, mining the past for cautionary tales, moral narratives, or exemplary stories. And many of these accounts are accompanied—in print, on air, and online—with iconic pictures and footage of breadlines, Hoovervilles, and other images of hard times. These images often function as a sort of visual shorthand, or the visual equivalent of a sound-bite about the 1930s, and students may need assistance in deciphering their meaning.
Let’s begin our month-long exchange by considering images showing the impact of the Depression. Work—or lack of it—is one key theme of the period. Unemployment devastated families and communities, and as the crisis grew Americans saw pictures of hardship in their daily newspapers and favorite magazines. Some documented the effects of the Depression, some commented on it. We can begin by asking the sort of probing questions that will help students dig under the surfaces of these pictures.
This is an example of a photograph that tells a story:
Unknown photographer, "Unemployed queued up at a Chicago soup kitchen," February 1931. NARA.
We can begin by asking students about what’s happening in the picture. Why do you think it was taken? Who are the intended viewers?
John T. McCutcheon, "While Washington Makes Up Its Mind . . .," Chicago Tribune, c. 1930.
With a forty-three-year career as a political cartoonist, ending with his death in 1949, John T. McCutcheon was long known for preferring amusement over harsh criticism in his cartoons (“I always enjoyed drawing a type of cartoon which might be considered a sort of pictorial breakfast food,” he once wrote). This cartoon, published while Herbert Hoover was still president and as the Depression deepened, seems to be an exception to McCutcheon’s usual approach. After Roosevelt was elected, McCutcheon’s cartoons departed from the widespread editorial attack on the New Deal by the overwhelmingly conservative ranks of newspaper publishers, including his own Chicago Tribune.
Cartoons rely on visual images to convey their meaning. This one has almost no text in the three panels. How does the cartoonist use images to tell the story? How does the caption complete the editorial?
Imogen Cunningham: The Private Gallery (9 photographs). Born in 1883, Imogen Cunningham was a photographer whose work influenced the recognition of photography as an art. She studied the chemistry of photography at the University of Washington, and in 1910 opened her own studio in Seattle, Washington. She is best known for her photographs of botanical and industrial subjects, and her portrait work. The portraits shown here might be seen as a bridge from her formal studio work to her later interest (in the 1940s) to documentary street photography.
This series offers an opportunity to get students to think about how photographs are composed. What’s in the background? What’s the effect of documenting unemployment through individual portraits (compared to the first photo of unemployed men in a soup line)? One of these photographs shows a man sleeping under a sign, “No thorofareâ€â€”this was a common visual device in photographs of poverty, using advertising or other signs as an ironic comment on the subject of the photograph.
Dorothea Lange, “Toward Los Angeles,†March 1937. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Dorothea Lange, best known for her haunting portrait “Migrant Mother,†was born in 1895 and learned photography in New York City. She moved to San Francisco in 1919 where she opened her own studio. She turned from studio work to documentary photography during the 1930s. Lange worked for the Resettlement Administration, soon renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA).
The FSA sought to improve the desperate conditions of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, and its efforts often drew fire from conservatives outraged by projects like agricultural collectives and government-subsidized cooperatives. Its most influential work was its documentary photography.
The FSA provides a fascinating case history in the politics of visual images. Part of the New Deal’s public relations work, the photography unit sought to document the plight of rural Americans and the successes of New Deal programs designed to respond to them. The photographs were circulated through press releases and exhibits organized around the country, an ambitious effort intended to educate Americans about rural poverty and to move them to support New Deal programs designed to address it. Under the direction of Roy Stryker, the photography unit eventually broadened its mandate, seeking to become a source of comprehensive documentation of less known or disappearing aspects of American life. Influential in its own time, documentary photography of the New Deal has had a profound effect on later generations too. In many ways our view of the Great Depression has been formed by this body of work.
How does the photographer use this composition to make a comment about the period? What does the billboard sign add to her story?
Dorothea Lange, "Refugee families encamped near Holtville, California," March 1937. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Forced off the land by drought, unemployment, and loss of farm tenancy, many rural Americans took to the road in search of work elsewhere. Lange and others documented makeshift camps lacking basic necessities.
What do you see in the foreground of this picture? How does it provide a comment on the situation of the human figures in it?
The automobile has long been a symbol of American prosperity, individualism, and freedom. How do the cars in this picture function? How does the composition of this photograph, with two cars framing the tent, tell its story?
I look forward to reading and responding to your comments about what is revealed in these and other Great Depression images and how they can be used in teaching.
12 Comments
Barbara’s initial post on Picturing the Great Depression makes wonderful points about the ways the New Deal era has resurfaced in our own dismal economic times as a visual and methaphorical touchstone for both positive and negative comparison and criticism. That said, it’s hard to look at the wonderfully understated 1931 McCutheon cartoon and not think of those contemporary paragons of conservative principle, the southern Republican governors, who are threatening to turn down the federal stimulus money that would require their states to expand unemployment insurance for part-time workers and the chronically underemployed. Someone needs to just update the 78 year-old McCutheon cartoon a tiny bit (perhaps change “Senate” to “Southern Republican Governors”) for it to be totally apt today. Plus ca change. . .
I’m intrigued by the Dorothea Lange image Towards Los Angeles. It strikes me that the highway that they’re walking on looks new, and was likely built as a result of New Deal road building programs. Ten years ago, that walk to LA would have been vastly different. No billboards, no paving- and in some instances- a train may have been the only route.
It almost seems ironic that though they’re not “relaxing” on a train, they are taking advantage of a – especially at this time – a very modern convenience. There seems to be a subtle conflict underlying this image between the old and the new that goes beyond the obvious message of poverty and struggle.
Steve and Aaron’s comments raise an interesting challenge to teaching history with archival images: how resonances with the past—i.e., historical images that resemble contemporary scenes, such as the first soup line photograph that Barbara Melosh presents—can obscure as much as illuminate the history we’re trying to teach. Familiarity, as the old saw goes, can breed contempt, but it also engenders a certain sense of indifference: the old plus ca change that Steve mentioned, but not in the spirit of revelation as much as in support of indifference. Having helped illustrate three editions of a textbook over the course of more than two decades, I am struck how the impact of images of want and deprivation has changed: displaying photographs of 1930s breadlines in the early 1980s, for example, was startling to young(ish) readers because, at the time, homelessness was not as visible to them as an everyday experience; but by the 1990s, with—at least in urban areas—the awful ubiquity of homelessness right before our eyes, showing similar images from the 1930s were no longer so shocking and, thus, less “interesting.”
So my question boils down to how we indicate parallels to the present when showing images of the Great Depression and also lend greater clarity to the “pastness” of those 1930s images. One way, I would argue, which is admittedly not the most elegant approach, is to also show images of earlier depressions—indeed, the previous “great depressions” that the adults of the 1930s could either themselves recall or had heard about from their parents and grandparents. The way want was portrayed through US history and the pictorial record of attempts to redress inequality (and contemporary commentary on those actions) may help to sharpen the differences as well as the similarities for our understanding of the US economy as a whole.
Josh makes a good point on looking at images of earlier depressions to give students a better sense of the context of the Great Depression and how people might have experienced it. Doing this also reduces the tendency to think of depressions as one-time events, something that some students might have believed before the present crisis, and encourages them to think of depressions as recurring events with a history of their own.
In my classes, I have also been struck by the value of surrounding visual images of the Thirties with biographical details about photographers and oral histories of that decade. My students are always fascinated by the story of how Dorothea Lange took the photo that became known as Migrant Mother; we use it as a jumping-off place to understand the production and reception of photographs.
Great to be in conversation about these evocative images! thanks to all who are posting.
I’m interested by Aaron Knoll’s reading of Dorothea Lange’s “Toward LA” as an image of possibility, and it reminds us of the multiple readings that such images make available.
In my own viewing, I’m struck by the emptiness of the road, built for cars but occupied by two walkers. The fact that they’re in the middle of the road implies there isn’t much vehicular traffic. The photograph suggests to me a narrative of men who are hitchhiking and walking while they await a ride. Yet the caption “Toward Los Angeles” and the composition (which places the viewer behind the walkers, looking, with them, to the road ahead) does suggest the sense of possibility that Aaron Knoll sees in this image. Perhaps it draws on cultural associations of the open road and the territory ahead as images of hope. And of course mobility itself is a longstanding response to economic instability. These men may not be getting very far very fast (as walkers) but they are on the move.
Great comments and insights on a body of work that has helped shape the teaching of U.S. history and the history of photography. In particular, I appreciate Rob Snyder’s classroom approach pairing visual images of the thirties with oral histories and biographical details on the photographer. I look forward to future discussions that address depictions of women and families in the Great Depression/New Deal era.
I agree wholeheartedly with Rob Synder about the usefulness of providing more context for students as we view these images. Information about the production, circulation, and reception of these photographs adds much more dimension to our seeing and our own responses and interpretations.
As I’ve worked on this project, I’ve wondered about how students today receive images and what assumptions they bring to their viewing. Likely many have some experience in production and manipulation of images through PhotoShop; they circulate and receive images via cell phones, digital cameras, MySpace etc. Yet it’s my impression that many often remain naive viewers nonetheless, convinced that seeing is believing. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, some who are aware of how easily images are manipulated may adapt a reflexive skepticism. Would be interested to hear the experience of others on this matter, and reflections on how it affects our teaching of visual culture.
Wonderful, provocative photos & questions!
I’ll be back!
Sincerely, Chester
Thanks to you all for sponsoring, authoring, and/or commenting on this forum. I just wanted to respond to the question of how we can help our students understand the historical specificity, or “pastness,” of these images. One important aspect of teaching documentary photography from the 1930s, I think, is doing some work to explain what documentary actually meant to various photographers at the time. Most of us, and most of our students, tend to take the idea of documentary for granted—as a form of transparent, indexical realism. Yet during the 1930s, the term (which had been coined in 1926) was an elastic one, open to debate. For an example of the varied meanings of “documentary photography†one might take a look at “Photo Notes,†the publication of the New York Photo League (an important urban counterpart to the FSA’s largely rural, small-town focus). There, for instance, one can read essays by noted art critic (and partner of Berenice Abbott) Elizabeth McCausland, who offered a relatively orthodox gloss on documetnary realism, and by Paul Strand, who suggested a more experimental, open-ended notion of documentary not “as mere record making–but as a problem of clarifying and creating a new art form.†In general, I tend to think that a close look at the discourse of documentary, as well as many of the photographs themselves, can help us and our students destabilize the boundaries between aesthetics and politics, and between realism and modernism, that we often tend to fall back on when looking at the visual culture of the Depression decade. Thanks again for this wonderful site and blog.
I like Josh’s idea of putting these images along side earlier representations of depression from the nineteenth century. Perhaps another way to instill a better sense of “pastness” about both the history and art form would be to widen “1930s documentary photography” beyond the iconic FSA photos. Prompted by an article in last week’s New York Times that mentioned a collection of rarely seen Arthur Rothstein photographs, I checked out Google’s Life Magazine Photo Archive (http://images.google.com/hosted/life) for the first time. From the main page, if you click on 1930s, Google automatically adds “poverty” to your search and you come up with the mostly beautiful, poignant, haunting images documenting human perseverance amidst natural and economic catastrophe. Now, take out the term 1930s, and you get a randomized and jarring assortment of fashion, fascism, face masks, Frank Lloyd Wright and much much more, from home and abroad, of famous people and not so famous people. I’m not sure what the lesson would be, but these more commercial, pedestrian photos from the 1930s provide a striking counter visual context for the FSA that makes the latter appear more improbable, remarkable, and entirely new.
thanks so much to all who have responded so far–really appreciating the insights and thoughtful reflection. Great suggestions and expansions on how to think about documentary.
as part of that, one thing I wonder about is how particular images have come to be iconic. New Deal materials offer more evidence than is usually available for investigating that question of reception. (still, of course, it’s usually not possible to reconstruct a full account of circulation, reception, framing, interpretation of any given image)
Then there’s also the problem/question of how much particular icons of the period frame the way we see the whole body of work. When you look at the fuller range of FSA photography, there’s plenty that doesn’t fit what we might consider iconic–and yet those more familiar images heavily influence what we see as typical.
On Leah Potter’s exercise, I think that is a really important way to approach use of visual images–to see where they fit in the wider visual landscape of the period, including a range of genres and media. It’s fascinating to see the borrowings and intertextuality–for two quick examples, the way advertising appropriates modernist styles (as Roland Marchand so effectively demonstrates); and the way American scene painting (representational in subject) includes Cubist and other modernist elements.
After reading Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich, I recently shared my thoughts on the similarities between the Depression and the economic flavor of the past couple of years, with my 86 year old mother. I commented, “The only time I get a sense of ’1937′ is when Hill mentions the cost of bread or quart of milk. To paraphrase, he stated the best part about the depression was that everyone was able to begin again with a clean slate.”
Our discussion intrigued my mother enough to read the book and decide to write one of her own, declaring “Now I know the reason why I have lived so long.”
Her vignette on growing up in Detroit in the 20′s and 30′s is insightfully rich. I am about to publish her powerfully evocative recollections and enhance it visually with my own life long passion on visual teaching strategies. This site is a an excellent resource. I look forward to further discussion.
Gloria
http://www.VisualTeachingAlliance.com