2009-10 Great Depression Reflection

Group Leaders: Read the following blog to your group and allow them to view the photographs. Discuss your feelings about what you see as you go. Write an individual reflection on your paper to turn in to Ms. Welch. Remember, I want a reflection that is well thought out, expressive (tells me how you feel) and serious. Put yourself in their position; how would you feel?
Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was a photographer best known for her Depression-era photographs. Her photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression. (Info from Wikipedia)

Examine the pictures. As you do so, think about the fact, during the Depression, thousands of Americans lived as this family is living—without homes and with hope fading fast. Read Lange’s explanation of the situation in which she took these pictures.

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. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

Write the details from the pictures and Lange’s description and how they strike you in some way.

Make some personal response to those details.

Write a summary or a poem;
pose questions;

draw a picture;

make some kind of personal connection to the visual and verbal information.