Not many people today actually remember the Great Depression. What most of us know about it comes from John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” and from photographs taken under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. “They have become the interlocking icons of the Great Depression,” writes James R. Swensen in “Picturing Migrants.”
Until now, Swensen claims, no one has done a major study on how the two were “stitched together.” “Picturing Migrants,” illustrated with dozens of FSA photographs, does just that.
There is no question that the pictures influenced Steinbeck. He worked with photographers. He visited the camps with them and studied their work. And in turn, publication of “The Grapes of Wrath” sent photographers scurrying to find Tom Joad and his family. Still, until the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, no copies of it included FSA photographs.
FSA photographers — Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein among them — produced about 130,000 images before World War II would make the Depression a thing of the past. It’s possible that the most widely reproduced photograph ever taken was Lange’s picture of “Migrant Mother,” which showed a troubled Florence Thompson, her chin in her hand, and her two daughters looking off behind her.
The photographs moved a nation: Picutures of “dust bowlers” in broken-down jalopies piled high with bedding and pots and pans; of migrant children, barefoot and ragged, and of filthy camps were seared on the minds of Americans. Some of the worst were taken along Oklahoma City’s Mays Avenue. “Children, looking like savages, played in the dumps, wandered along the neighboring, muddy banks of the half-stagnant Canadian River … so foul were these human habitations and so vast their extent that some authorities reluctantly expressed the belief that Oklahoma City contained the largest and the worst congregation of migrant hovels between the Mississippi river and the Sierras,” a visitor wrote. One photograph shows boys too demoralized to shoo the flies off their faces. As bad as the squalor and filth were, even worse were the despair and hopelessness on the faces of Mays Avenue inhabitants.
Ansel Adams considered the photographers “socialists with cameras.” Many politicians and local government officials claimed the pictures were staged, that things couldn’t be that bad. But the pictures were hard to deny. So was Steinbeck’s novel, which stunned American readers with its documentary-like prose. Some dismissed it as communist propaganda. But it stayed on the best-seller lists for years. The movie, staring Henry Fonda, with its images so like those taken by FSA photographers, emphasized the migrant plight even more.
By the time the film was issued, in 1940, the government had taken steps to help the migrant farm workers, setting up sanitary camps, for instance. The FSA photographers documented all that, along with enclaves of prosperity. One was Pie Town, N.M., where many migrants settled, finding work and homes. The Pie Town photographs are some of the best known of the Dust Bowl images.
Could photographers today have the impact of those of the 1930s? Swensen doubts it. “It is unlikely that any image will emerge” like that of Migrant Mother, Swensen writes. Florence Thompson continued to live a migrant life long after her picture became famous. “If Dorothea Lange were to make a similar image today,” he adds, “her subject would be on the talk show circuit by the end of the week and have her own reality show by the end of the year.”
