By Karen Dewitt
Albany, NY – The "Great Recession" of the past year has led many people to focus once again on the Great Depression of the 1930's. At the New York State museum, an exhibit of iconic photographs from that era, titled " This Great Nation Will Endure", offers insight on how many Americans fared during that time.
The exhibition of the 150 photographs is named after the memorable line in President Franklin Roosevelt's March 4, 1933, Inaugural Address, says the show's curator and FDR Library museum curator Herman Eberhardt.
"Unemployment is running at 25%, the country is in the fourth year of the Great Depression," said Eberhardt. "And he says, this great nation will endure as it has endured. It will revive and it will prosper'."
And the people in the photographs, most of them living in ramshackle farm houses and migrant worker camps, are enduring- all kinds of hardships.
The exhibit includes the iconic photo by Dorothea Lange, "Migrant Mother", as well as lesser known photographs which are just as compelling.
In one photo, by Russell Lee, four small children living in a broken down farm house in Smithfield, Iowa, are eating Christmas dinner, in 1936. According to the caption, their meal consists of potatoes, cabbage and pie.
Yet the photo is beautifully composed, capturing the rhythm of the four heads bent attentively over their meager repast. And Eberhardt says it's that contrast that makes it work.
"There's tremendous warmth in the faces of the children," Eberhardt says.
The pictures, culled from a collection of nearly 80,000 negatives, are the legacy of the small band of photojournalists hired by the Farm Security Administration. The FSA was designed to provide aid to rural regions of America suffering under the economic effects of the Great Depression as well as the drought that caused the dust bowl. The FSA's photography unit was not a jobs program for artists, the
best photographers of their day were chosen for the project- including, in addition to Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and Ben Shahn.
"These were extraordinarily talented people who essentially defined the world of photojournalism for the mid to latter part of the century," said Eberhardt.
The photos were distributed to newspapers all across the country, which were free to use them to illustrate stories and, if they chose, to write their own captions. Some of those newspaper stories are on display in the exhibit.
The show also focuses on techniques the photographers used to achieve their end results. Lange, for example, often used her husband, the economist Paul Taylor, who traveled with her on assignments, to distract or set at ease the subjects of her portraits.
Some of the photos were controversial. While the bulk were straightforward documentation of people's lives, a few were manipulated. In one, by Arthur Rothstein, the skull of a steer lies on a vast swath of parched earth. Eberhardt says the photographer did not originally discover the skull on the dry ground. He moved it several hundred feet from a patch of grass, to achieve an
aesthetically superior result.
"It gets at an essential question that surrounds photo journalism then and now," said Eberhardt. "Altering of details, where do you draw the line."
He says it's still an issue that's debated today. And the exhibit examines another question still relevant now says Eberhardt, just what can people endure. It turns out, quite a lot.
"There's tremendous dignity, tremendous strength in their faces and their body language," he said. "It's inspiring."
The show will be at the state museum through March 14th.