The artwork I chose to share this week is not a painting, but a photograph. As the world of photography began to evolve, the photograph was used to capture specific scenes that in most cases were meant to evoke a certain emotion, or to entice certain political or moral convictions. Both purposes are used in Dorothea Lange’s photo journal of the families most hurt by the Great Depression and in the photo journal capturing the lives of those affected by the Dust Bowl. As the pains of the Great Depression spread across the nation for years, another disaster inflicted poverty on many Americans–The Dust Bowl. Lange was hired by the Farm Security Administration to capture the crisis many families had fallen into during the time of the Dust Bowl as they searched for employment in the fertile lands of the west, or were left in ruin. One such photograph, “People Living in Miserable Poverty. Elm Grove, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma” is shown below.
This picture was taken in August of 1936. It is hard to believe that people in the United States fell into such poverty that was present in the Depression era, but here it is, in black and white. I find it interesting that the mother and son are looking into the distance and the daughter looks straight at the camera, I do not know what that means, but it puzzles me. Lange did not consider herself an artist, according to peoplewhotellthetruth.com, but her ability to capture the emotion of the subjects in the photograph is amazing. The distress on their faces is very evident, although they almost seem numb. My heart aches for the people in the photographs that Lange took. They would have convicted me, jolted me to action.
