The Great Depression Through the Lens of Dorothea Lange

The Great Depression Through The Lens of Dorothea Lange

A Camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

- Dorothea Lange

Although many do not know her name, Dorothea Lange’s photographs live in the subconscious of virtually anyone in the United States who has any concept of the economic disaster known as the Great Depression. Her photographs tend to linger in viewers’ memories as if their intensity etched itself into their mind. Through traces of human experiences and feelings in people’s faces, the expression in their eyes, and their gestures, Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph, Migrant Mother (1936), defined documentary photography and came to symbolize the Great Depression, showing how one photograph can embody a complete thought or even an entire story.

Dorothea Lange’s career developed when the severe economic depression of the 1930s created a political opening for expanding and deepening American democracy. The Great Depression was triggered by the collapse of the stock market. In late October of 1929, the New York Stock Exchange experienced several huge financial losses. Investors lost fourteen billion dollars on October 28 and fifteen billion dollars the next day. Total losses for the month came to an incredible fifty billion dollars, which would be equivalent to hundreds of billions today. Furthermore, in the months that followed, the market continued to lose money.

The staggering losses produced a series of events that sent the entire U.S. Economy into a downward spiral. In a sort of domino effect, one damaging event triggered another, which caused another. In the words of a modern expert: “[Many people] found themselves with much less [money] than they had thought they had, or with nothing at all. By [the] millions they quit buying anything except what they had to have to stay alive. This drop in spending threw the stores into trouble, and they quit ordering [new products] and discharged clerks. When orders stopped, the factories shut down, and factory workers had no jobs.”

Job losses were the most obvious and severe effect of the Depression. Many millions of Americans no longer had enough money to make ends meet. Millions of Americans couldn’t pay their mortgages or rent, so they eventually became homeless. To make matters worse, tens of millions of Americans lost most or all of their life savings due to the fact that many banks suffered catastrophic losses. Between 1929 and 1933, more than 9,000 U.S. Banks went under and as a result, the money people had deposited simply disappeared. Entire families had to live in their cars, in alleys, or in