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crashdive123
08-23-2010, 08:11 AM
I really enjoyed the pictures that Hunter63 linked to in this thread. http://www.wilderness-survival.net/forums/showthread.php?t=13185 We often romanticize about the past. Living in simpler times are often the subjects of daydreams. We often forget that not everything was sunshine and light during those simpler times. I suspect that many of the people of those times would love to have the opportunities that would be afforded to them in our times. At least in our time, we have a choice. Here are some more photographs of a time that I hope we do not have to experience again. Those that did were true survivors in many ways.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/photoessay.htm

your_comforting_company
08-23-2010, 08:44 AM
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it

hard to make that sound "romantic". Thanks for the link. Really brings home the effects of economic collapse.
There are still a few sharecroppers around these parts.. Guys who live on the farmland, watching over the farmers resources and property, for a free place to live. It is a grim reminder that even today, poverty is not extinct.
Every time I think things are bad for me, I drive down that old dirt road, by the shotgun houses, and old slave shacks on the plantations, just to remind myself that things really aren't "that bad".

The bit about the assembly lines really hits home too.. Every time a person is replaced by a robot, the company makes more money, and another family is plunged into a struggle for survival.

Amazing how many of the people are smiling in the pictures.. even when times were so bad.

BENESSE
08-23-2010, 08:47 AM
Nothing romantic about those times--Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
And, as you mentioned Crash, we do have a choice today. Those of us who pine for a simpler life can live it and a few actually do. But there's a huge difference between choosing to do it (Sourdough) and being forced to do it. Just ask those who lost their job, can't find another one and are at the edge of existence.

rudyumans
08-23-2010, 10:15 AM
Thank you Crash. As you might expect, I enjoy this kind of thing. The pictures in the link you posted were done by really famous photographers who were, like Hunter's, also employed or on assignment by the Farm Security Administration at the time. These assignments were based on grants the photographers had to apply for. Sometimes these assignments lasted for years. The Farm Security Administration was originally the "Resettlement Administration" that was supposed to regulate and plan urban and rural settlements. When the Great Depression came, they changed it into the Farm Security Administration to battle poverty in rural areas. These photographers were hired to document all that. To inventory the poverty so to speak.

Rick
08-23-2010, 10:27 AM
Thanks, Crash. Good reminder.

Dad joined the Civil Conservation Corps during that time. He must have been around 19 and I think he was in Wisconsin but I'm not for certain.

Grandpa lost his farm in the depression. Land that had been homesteaded by his great grandfather. It was repossessed on a loan for crop seed by his aunt! It was a tough time for all.