Great Depression Website

On the site I searched through the New Deal Documents and found an article under Propaganda titled "You Have Seen Their Pictures", which was published in a magazine called Survey Graphic on April 1st, 1940. This article discusses the importance of the camera in showing through pictures the poverty that farmers and other people throughout the nation were experiencing during the Great Depression. It also talks about the large part these pictures played through the Farm Security Administration. The purpose of the photographic division of the Farm Security Administration was to take their snapshots to reflect the state of the impoverished farmer, and get newspapers to publish them. One of the leaders in this field was Roy Stryker, who was renowned for using his pictures to show the social and economic troubles of America during the Great Depression. He also was known for saying that it was the responsibility of a photographer to portray the social forces going on in the picture taken.

I thought that this article was an interesting bit of history because I had no idea that pictures were so essential to showing the troubles of our country to the ordinary American. But by the end of reading this article it had made an important point that the power of photos is in showing atrocities or terrible things happening to people and causing motivation because of this for change.