Great American Photographers Series 2: The Great Depression Era

Select four of the photographs and write your personal essay in your own words. Use the rubric as a tool to assess your progress. Write a comparison and contrast of at least four of the photographs that I have provided for your analysis and further research. You may want to try to structure the comparison and contrast essay in a similar fashion as a “Document Based Question” Essay is structured on the Global Regents Exam and consider questions such as those on the following slide.

Great American Photographers Series 2

  What do you see in each image?; What is compelling about each one?   What do you think that the artists were trying to show to the viewer?   Did they want the viewer to come away with ideas about the time during The Great Depression or about humanity?   How many social issues does each photograph represent for you as a viewer?   Do you have specific feelings and thoughts when you examine these

artworks?

Lunchroom Near Belle Glade, Florida, Marion Post Wolcott, 1939 Marion Post Wolcott, was a noted American photographer who Worked for the Farm Security Administ- ration during the Great Depression documenting poverty and Deprivation…While in Vienna she saw some of the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and was horrified. Soon she and her sister had to return to America for safety. She went back to teaching but also continued her photography and became involved in the anti-fascist movement. At the New York Photo League she met Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand who encouraged her. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Marion_Post_Wolcott)

Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, 1936 WiththeonsetoftheGreatDepression,Langeturnedhercameralensfromthestudiotothestreet.Herstudiesofunemployedandhomelesspeoplecapturedthea;en<onoflocalphotographersandledtoheremploymentwiththefederalRese;lementAdministra<on(RA),latercalledtheFarmSecurityAdministra<on(FSA).ThewomaninthephotoisFlorenceOwensThompson.TheoriginalphotofeaturedFlorence’sthumbandindexfingeronthetentpole,buttheimagewaslaterretouchedtohideFlorence’sthumb.In1960,Langespokeaboutherexperiencetakingthephotograph:“Isawandapproachedthehungryanddesperatemother,asifdrawnbyamagnet.IdonotrememberhowIexplainedmypresenceormycameratoher,butIdoremembersheaskedmenoques<ons.Imadefiveexposures,workingcloserandcloserfromthesamedirec<on.Ididnotaskhernameorherhistory.Shetoldmeherage,thatshewasthirty‐two.Shesaidthattheyhadbeenlivingonfrozenvegetablesfromthesurroundingfields,andbirdsthatthechildrenkilled.Shehadjustsoldthe<resfromhercartobuyfood.Thereshesatinthatlean‐totentwithherchildrenhuddledaroundher,andseemedtoknowthatmypicturesmighthelpher,andsoshehelpedme.Therewasasortofequalityaboutit.”[source:Wikipedia]AccordingtoThompson’sson,Langegotsomedetailsofthisstorywrong,buttheimpactofthepicturewasbasedontheimageshowingthestrengthandneedofmigrantworker.(h;p://harryneelam.com/photoblog/dorothea‐lange‐photo‐of‐the‐day/)

Thirteen Year Old Sharecropper Boy Near Americus Georgia,Dorothea Lange, 1937 With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). (h;p://harryneelam.com/photoblog/dorothea‐lange‐photo‐of‐the‐day/)

The Louisville Flood, Margaret Bourke-White, 1937

Throughout the 1930s Bourke-White went on assignments to create photo-essays in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Dust Bowl in the American Midwest. These experiences allowed her to refine the dramatic style she had used in industrial and architectural subjects.

These projects also introduced people and social issues as subject matter into her oeuvre, and she developed a compassionate, humanitarian approach to such photos (www.brittanica.com/Ebchecked/topic/75883/Margaret-Bourke-White) Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx, NY.

Sharecropper’s Family Hale County, Alabama, 1936 Walker Evans The Depression years of 1935–36 were ones of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In June 1935, he accepted a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an "information specialist" in the Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration, a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture. (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah)

Street Scene, Vicksburg, Mississippi Walker Evans, 1936 Walker Evans is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His elegant, crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications have inspired several generations of artists, from Helen Levitt and Robert Frank to Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher…

Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. His principal subject was the vernacular-the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés), advertisements, simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making. (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm)

Moorish Jews of Harlem, James Van der Zee 1929 Van Der Zee was one of the foremost African American photographers during the Harlem Renaissance. His many prints, negatives and glass plates are known for documenting the spirit of the period, while also cultivating black pride, especially between the world wars.

In his portraits Van Der Zee worked to both document social life and present aesthetically pleasing pieces of art. (http://aarlarchives.blogspot.com/2010/12/happy-hanukkah.html)