"Ditched, Stalled and Stranded": Dorothea Lange and the Great Depression

During the Great Depression, a top commercial portraitist took to San Francisco’s streets to experiment with representing the social devastation surrounding her. Her photos showed men sleeping on sidewalks and in parks like bundles of rags spit out by the economy. Dorothea Lange described watching from her studio windows the unemployed "drifting" past, and wanting to do something. Her "Man Beside Wheelbarrow" (1934) displays one such victim. The worker is bent up against a blank cinderblock expanse. We see only his workingman’s cap; he cannot face the light. Lange later told an interviewer that she "wanted to take a picture of a man as he stood in his world . . . a man with his head down, with his back against the wall, with his livelihood, like the wheelbarrow, overturned." Lange’s camera eye recorded the Depression’s victims—men, women, and children—and its survivors. Lange attended to social relationships, how a person "stood in the world." Her informed sight led her to become one of the world’s foremost documentary photographers, whose Depression-era portraits challenged citizens then and now to nurture public policies designed to confront America’s social distress.  

The stock market crash of October 1929 serves as shorthand for the Depression’s start, but the economy had slowed since mid-decade. After the crash, the economy unraveled. The nation’s GNP dropped by one-third. Companies cut production, cut wages, and then cut jobs. In five months after the crash, unemployment doubled and by the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt came into office, a full quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Businesses folded, farmers went bankrupt, throwing one-third of farmers off the land, and banks failed, some 9,000 of them, taking the life savings of nine million Americans. The earth itself seemed to protest when the Great Plains Dustbowl sent soils from Texas and Oklahoma all the way to New York City and Washington, DC.

The Depression distorted some lives more than others. Married women, perceived as competitors to male breadwinners, could be prohibited by ordinance or legislation from holding jobs. Some two million Mexican Americans were deported; nearly half were US citizens. Pushed off the land in the deep South, African Americans were forced to become day laborers or domestics. African American unemployment was twice that of Americans as a whole. Regions or cities tied to specific industries, such as tire-producing Akron, auto parts center Toledo, or Pennsylvania mining towns had unemployment rates exceeding 60 percent.    

This was a far cry from the triumphalist capitalism of the 1920s, when Americans were promised automobiles, refrigerators, and gleaming bathroom tile. President Calvin Coolidge had pronounced that the "chief business of the American people is business," and Herbert Hoover, when accepting the Republican nomination in 1928, opined that America had "triumphed" over poverty. This prosperity shaped Lange’s early career. As an emerging portraitist, the New Jersey–born Lange took society photographs in her new home of San Francisco. Softly diffused light enveloped many subjects; even close-ups flattered her elite Bay Area clients. Lange mostly shot in her studio—known for its velvet couch, her Russian samovar with tea for guests, a warm fire, and Lange herself, sometimes garbed in elegant Fortuny gowns.   

Lange’s earliest street photo was the "White Angel Breadline" (The "White Angel," Lois Jordan, distributed food to more than one million San Franciscans). An elderly man stands against crude lumber rails, his head turned down, waiting for charity. His mouth is pulled downward in a grimace; his fedora is dirtied, its folds soft, not sharp. His hands clench each other and reach toward the viewer. A cup, seemingly empty, sits on the rails between his arms. The light captures his hands and the stubble on his chin. Even though he is pinned by the crowd, the man broods in isolation—only three other faces are visible. Asked about this photograph years later, Lange said it vitalized her: "I went out just absolutely in the blind staggers. I had something to do." She had expressed the tragedy of that era’s "Forgotten Man." San Francisco was a hotbed of workers’ activism, and Lange’s early forays recorded labor’s mobilizations (particularly San Francisco’s 1934 General Strike), fiery orators, and police restraining demonstrators.

Lange hung these photos on her studio walls, and visitors were uncertain of what to make of them, as the "documentary" genre had no name. Aside from Jacob Riis’s lantern slides of New York City’s poverty-stricken tenement districts and Lewis Hine’s "social photography" profiling child laborers, such photographs were uncommon. Lange’s California peers took landscape photographs and nudes. Environmental photographer Ansel Adams, Lange’s friend-competitor, said unkindly that the documentary photographers, as they would soon be called, were "sociologists with cameras."

But Lange’s work, once exhibited, brought her to the attention of an agricultural economist, Paul Taylor. Taylor studied California’s agricultural laborers who worked in fields owned by major growers. From Taylor, Lange learned to listen to her subjects and to articulate the circumstances that led to their marginalization. The two soon wed and Taylor introduced Lange to working for the government.

The Resettlement Administration (RA), later reorganized as the Farm Security Administration (FSA), was an initiative of Columbia University economist Rexford Tugwell, a New Deal braintruster. Tugwell saw the unintended consequences of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which exacerbated land consolidation and mechanization, resulting in small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers being thrown off the land by larger owners and speculators. The RA/FSA responded to their losses, rehabilitated eroded land, and sheltered migrant farmers. Underfunding limited RA/FSA accomplishments, but the agency’s commissioning of photographers to document the Depression remains a monument to government cultural work. Roy Stryker managed the agency’s Historical Section, designed to publicize its programs. Stryker expanded his brief, imagining a "visual encyclopedia of American life." He hired professionals like Lange and Walker Evans, artists like Ben Shahn, and novices like Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, and Esther Bubley. Ultimately, RA/FSA photographers took some 175,000 black-and-white images, and another 1,600 color ones.

RA/FSA photographs were seen in exhibitions at county fairs, conferences, and world’s fairs; they were part of congressional investigations; and they were displayed in murals, newspapers, and the new photo magazines. These magazines, particularly LOOK and LIFE, ensured that a mass audience of millions of Americans consumed their news, including RA/FSA photographs, visually. Novelists, poets, and photographers used RA/FSA photographs in an experimental realist form—the photo book—to dramatize the Depression. Lange’s photos feature prominently in her and Taylor’s American Exodus about the nation’s agricultural crisis, Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free on the Depression’s challenge to democracy, and Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices, which charted the plight of black Americans.

The RA/FSA photos shape our collective memory of the Great Depression. Dorothea Lange, who only took 4,000 or so of the agency’s photographs, had an outsized influence on our understanding of it, then and now. Lange crisscrossed the nation in her on-again, off-again employment at the RA/FSA from 1935 until 1939. In her home of California she photographed migrants and "fruit tramps" on the road, and others who were "Ditched, Stalled and Stranded" (1936). She showed laborers dragging hundred-pound cotton sacks through the fields and pulling drinking water from muddy pools outside their shacks, and grandmothers and babies marooned outdoors in camps. In Texas she identified a group of hardy young men who were "tractored out." The landowners no longer needed farm hands. These economically vulnerable men lacked political power; they could not pay the poll tax and could not vote.

Lange traveled to the South multiple times, taking searing images of southern racism and poverty. She met with members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, heralding their interracial solidarity in an era when crossing the color line could mean death. Her 1937 Greene County, Georgia, photographs comment on southern history. In several, chimneys from old plantation houses stand, lone remnants of former grandeur. The chimneys are mute evocations of a past that persists, even as it erodes. Unlike monuments to the Confederacy that she also captured, these chimneys puncture the plantation mythology, so popular in the 1930s, reminding viewers that the war was fought over slavery. Most intriguing is her shot of a former slave and his wife on the steps of "a plantation house now in decay."

The man and wife sit on a simple plank staircase, and weeds peek through. The front and back doors gape open. A young white man in overalls stands aside the imposing fluted column, but he no longer commands. The couple told Lange that when the Yankees came around telling them they were free they had already run off with the best horses and mules. This couple had not counted on northerners to bring liberty. Lange’s photos provide a powerful message about the ravages of southern life, but also of a people’s tenacious will to survive and make anew the world around them. Lange’s depiction of the crumbling columns of antebellum mansions reminded viewers that southern paternalism was a shell, that no social order is static. 

Lange explored the ironies of consumer culture in an era of dispossession. She took many photographs of the road, in American lore tied to mobility and reinvention. She showed entire families on the road—if fortunate, they had an auto or jalopy piled high with possessions. But some families walked—with baby carriages, carts, and wagons—sometimes hundreds of miles. In "Toward Los Angeles" (1937), two migrants seem to walk jauntily along the road leading into the future—the billboard urges "Next Time Try the Train." Where do they head?

For migrants, there is no relaxation, no shelter, no destination. In another photo taken along California Route 99, a Union Pacific billboard’s base supports a ragged tarp shielding three families from the elements. Their stove and rocking chair lie beneath a blistering sun just below the advertisement of a soft pillow cushioning a young man’s head. The advertisement reads, "Travel while you sleep"; the image and text dwarf the migrants’ meager domestic arrangements.

Lange’s most famous photograph—"Migrant Mother"—has become the symbol of the Depression. As Lange’s Bancroft Prize–winning biographer, Linda Gordon, writes, those unfamiliar with Lange often describe the Depression by referring to "Migrant Mother." Lange thought the photo of Florence Owens Thompson, a thirty-two-year-old mother of seven, "had a life of its own," making it "her picture, not mine." Among the most reproduced photos in the world, "Migrant Mother" has been repurposed for a Black Power poster and a Venezuelan women’s magazine cover; the image was also featured on a 1998 USPS stamp. An Italian photographer redid the image using Hollywood’s John Malkovich as the subject; Ralph Lauren claims Thompson as fashion muse; folk woodcarvers have whittled the image; postmodernists have appropriated it; and most recently it inspired the novel Mary Coin. The photo is iconic for many reasons: its evocation of the Western tradition of Madonna and child, its universal exploration of "human heartbreak," and its embodiment of the tension between vulnerability and resilience that parallels Americans’ own ambiguous understanding of the Depression. Roy Stryker, Lange’s RA/FSA supervisor, said the photo was "the picture of Farm Security." He wrote, "she has all the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too." Recent critics are less kind. Of the six shots Lange took, only this one became celebrated. For the critics, Lange’s aesthetic choice and public approbation precludes trusting "Migrant Mother" as documentary. Some find the image staged, voyeuristic, or sentimental. Others criticize the rhetoric of liberal reform—ensconced in bourgeois assumptions about family life and aimed at making viewers feel better about themselves, without challenging poverty’s root causes. Critics too often neglect the historic circumstances within which Lange and other documentarians worked; they blithely ignore the New Deal’s political challenges.

Historians have shown how racism, an individualist ethos, and distrust toward the state undercut demands for social programs. Indeed, compromises made to attain our nation’s limited welfare state hobbled these programs at birth. Lange called her photographs "ammunition," understanding that even in the midst of our nation’s worst economic peril, citizens needed visual confirmation of what surrounded them.  

Carol Quirke is Associate Professor of American Studies at SUNY Old Westbury. She is the author of a forthcoming biography of Dorothea Lange (Westview Press) and also Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America’s Working Class (Oxford University Press, 2012).