In the 1930s North America’s economy tanked along with the rest of the world’s, following WWI and The Roaring Twenties (more on the 20s: Alanah’s blog). The now dry farmlands known as Dust Bowls became full of families forced into a life of wandering. These families truly represented the harsh and dark times that had fallen over Canada and the United States, and none of them more than the family of Florence Owens Thompson, the focus of this iconic
photo: Migrant Mother, taken in 1936. In this photo we see a mothers face full of concern with the weight of her children literally on her shoulders. But the surprising thing about this photograph is that it is technically propaganda used by the United States Government.

 

 

This here is a picture of Dorothea Lange, a renowned photographer and journalist who was sent to the California by the US government in 1935. She was the photographer who took the Migrant Mother photo, but she was not the only one there.

 

In 1937 the US Department of Agriculture created what they called the FSA. The Farm Security Administration. The purpose of this program was to not only help with the immediate needs of struggling farmers such as medicine, training programs, and loans, but to bring the rest of the world’s attention to what was happening in the dust bowls, and how important agriculture is for North America.

The FSA hired photographers, filmmakers and other artists to find a way to communicate the ideas the program was founded on, in a way that the world could relate to during the trying times of the Great Depression. The result was over 77,000 images, each one playing a part in telling the story of the personal struggles of those in the images, but also the story of the world as a whole during the Great Depression. When these photos were published people related, the project was successful in helping the struggling families of the dust bowls through donations of food, water and funding, but perhaps more importantly the project was also successful in creating a collection of timeless images that will forever tell the story of the Great Depression, a time of worldwide hardship, and the coming together of people that followed.

So, was the FSA a Government program based on using poverty for propaganda and the painting itself as the hero of these desperate times? Or was it simply a wake up call, giving America the chance to see a reflection of itself while at it’s worst? Whatever the intentions, the result is the same. What you choose to believe about why the FSA came to be, does not take away from the stories of the people in these photographs, frozen in time as an eternal example of strength and perseverance during the seemingly hopeless times of The Great Depression.