Photographing the Great Depression, then and now – Dorothea Lange

Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian makes valid and pertinent points using Lange’s image as a start to assess the current world financial crisis.

“Dorothea Lange‘s stark portraits of poverty-stricken Americans in the 1930s seem terrifyingly contemporary…………When Lange took her photograph, times were terrible. But there were powerful voices of optimism and rationality, from Roosevelt to John Maynard Keynes, and these voices would win through in the end. In 2011 American politics seems headed in the opposite direction to the forward-looking road it took in the 1930s, while everywhere primitive gloom is in the ascendant. In this sense the situation does not resemble the 1930s. It is potentially far worse.”

Read the whole article here

Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker and mother of seven children. Photograph: Dorothea Lange/Getty Images