With the infamous crash of the stock market in 1929, the United States entered one of the darkest and most traumatic periods in American history. A frightening culmination of social, environmental, economic and political upheavals and disasters compounded the desperation and suffering in the daily lives of individuals, families, and communities during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Dorothea Lange infused a sense of humanity into her photography capable of weaving a bridge between the working and poverty classes, to those fortunate enough to be spared the worst of the economic and societal devastation. This was during a time where social programs for the needy were near absent or were political and economic experiments in their infancy, labor strife was at a full boil, and where so-called “Okies” and California migrant peoples of all cultural backgrounds were viewed with contempt and suspicion. As intimate facets that were a part of much larger and complex global structural changes and instabilities, Lange’s subjects were presented in “universalizing, nonconfrontational terms” despite their extreme social and economic vulnerability, and made more visible in their migratory lives and movements, homes, and social spaces among the rural California landscapes.
As a photographer for the Farm Securities Administration and alongside economist Paul Taylor, she captured some of the most compelling images of Depression-era women, children, and families in California’s vast Central Valley and surrounding rural and agricultural locations where migrant families made their ephemeral homes. Although most of Lange’s subjects appeared to remain anonymous, the vivid and sometimes revealing captions and titles she paired along with the conceptual framing of images themselves constructed narratives of the daily lives of rural Great Depression populations living in California and throughout the United States.
Our exhibition will attempt to form and explore alternative narratives by arranging and thinking of the images in terms of how those societies and communities existed within and among geographic landscapes, environment, and space. Home along the 99: Dorothea Lange, rural families, and California landscapes of the Great Depression will address both the minority and Dust Bowl migrant populations along the rural highways and migrant camps of Central California, and will explore the networks, relationships and movements formed by these people as they made their homes among the land.
Dorothea Lange infused a sense of humanity into her photography capable of weaving a bridge between the working and poverty classes, to those fortunate enough to be spared the worst of the economic and societal devastation. This was during a time where social programs for the needy were near absent or were political and economic experiments in their infancy, labor strife was at a full boil, and where so-called “Okies” and California migrant peoples of all cultural backgrounds were viewed with contempt and suspicion. As intimate facets that were a part of much larger and complex global structural changes and instabilities, Lange’s subjects were presented in “universalizing, nonconfrontational terms” despite their extreme social and economic vulnerability, and made more visible in their migratory lives and movements, homes, and social spaces among the rural California landscapes.
As a photographer for the Farm Securities Administration and alongside economist Paul Taylor, she captured some of the most compelling images of Depression-era women, children, and families in California’s vast Central Valley and surrounding rural and agricultural locations where migrant families made their ephemeral homes. Although most of Lange’s subjects appeared to remain anonymous, the vivid and sometimes revealing captions and titles she paired along with the conceptual framing of images themselves constructed narratives of the daily lives of rural Great Depression populations living in California and throughout the United States.
Our exhibition will attempt to form and explore alternative narratives by arranging and thinking of the images in terms of how those societies and communities existed within and among geographic landscapes, environment, and space. Home along the 99: Dorothea Lange, rural families, and California landscapes of the Great Depression will address both the minority and Dust Bowl migrant populations along the rural highways and migrant camps of Central California, and will explore the networks, relationships and movements formed by these people as they made their homes among the land.
