Bill Ganzel. Abandoned house in the middle of a cotton field. Childress County, Texas, August 1979

The Great Depression of the 1930’s was a pivotal time in our history. The events of the decade shaped the economics, politics, and society we live in. Even those of us who were born afterward are descendants of that decade.

In the forty years since the Depression ended, much has been written about it—of how much money was lost in the stock market crash of 1929, of how many jobs were lost during the decade, of how many farmers lost their land and joined a migrant stream flowing across the Great Divide to the west coast, of how low farm prices fell for those who stayed. The figures can show how many left farms for the small towns, and how many others left the small towns for the cities. The figures can also show that the Great Plains region was one of the hardest hit regions in the country, hit by both economic conditions and a lingering drought.

What figures do not show is what it was like to live through that time, how life on a day-to-day level was changed forever by the hardships the Depression inflicted. What figures cannot show, photographs often are able to do. One of the many programs spawned by Roosevelt’s New Deal was the one called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Its main job was to help tenant farmers stay on their land through loans and other programs, but they also had a "historical section." Under the direction of Roy Stryker, this section first worked to publicize the terrible conditions under which the poorest third of the nation lived and then to provide a "pictorial encyclopedia" of life in the United States during the 30’s. The agency lasted eight years, from 1935 to 1943, in various guises. During that time Stryker hired and sent into the field a remarkable assortment of photographers—Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Carl Mydans, Jack Delano, John Collier, and Gordon Parks. They covered the entire nation, and produced 80,000 photographs that are now housed in the Library of Congress. These make up a virtual history of the decade.

Eight years ago, I became curious about what had happened to some of the people who were in those photographs. I started trying to track down some of the same people and same places first photographed by the FSA 40 years ago. This exhibit is a result of the project. The scope is the ten states of the Great Plains and some of those people who left the Plains for the west coast.

The FSA prints in the exhibit were made by the Library of Congress photoduplication service from the original negatives. The FSA captions on each panel have been taken from the original captions in the Library collection. Several panels have excerpts from oral history interviews conducted with the people I was able to track down in the photographs.

—BILL GANZEL