Transformational photographer Edward Steichen knew the piercing power of photographs. His last project for the Museum of Modern Art, The Bitter Years: 1935-1941, showcased the poverty, hunger and bleak life for Americans during the Great Depression.
“I believe it is good at this time to be reminded of those ‘Bitter Years,’ ” he wrote of a 1962 exhibition, “and to bring them into the consciousness of a new generation, which
has problems of its own, but is largely unaware of the endurance and fortitude that made the emergence from the Great Depression one of America’s victorious hours.”
Now in Charleston, we are lucky the Gibbes Museum of Art has brought a stunning updated collection of these New Deal photographs by famed visual artists Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano and others. Not only did their work appear in Steichen’s exhibition, but they launched documentary photography careers two decades earlier as staff photographers for the Farm Services Administration (FSA) in a project that generated more than 200,000 still images that defined the Depression.
The Gibbes’ exhibition, which runs through Jan. 14, 2024, is filled with images you may have seen — Lange’s exhausted migrant mother nursing a child in a dusty California field or Evans’ portrayals of the bare homes of three sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama.
Steichen’s original New York exhibition of more than 200 photographs featured only three from South Carolina. The Gibbes noted that was not unique as “very few of the photographs from the Farm Security Administration taken in South Carolina have ever been presented in or out of the state.” But the museum’s new show offers several South Carolina photographs taken by the great FSA photographers, including Lange’s black-and-white portrait of a sharecropper wife and mother of seven children in Chesnee; a battered Charleston street scene and a shack near Summerville, both by Wolcott; Delano’s portraits of two Bonneau landowners who had to move out of the Santee-Cooper basin; and a fruit sign by Evans.
What’s important about these photographs nine decades after the Depression is how they portray the resilience in the American spirit. Despite dust bowls, boll weevils, hunger, poverty and hard times, Americans survived and started to thrive, particularly after World War II. The country pulled together enacting an array of New Deal programs to lift up the poor and create a stronger middle class.
Fifteen years ago, Charleston-born artist Shepard Fairey memorialized the hope of the nation and the man who became America’s first Black president. Too soon, however, came a reversal — an age in which division, fear and inequities bloomed across the country.
So it is with great thanks to the Gibbes for reminding us how bitter times can lead to better times. Now, let’s just take this gentle admonition to heart, pull together as a country and bat away the nattering nabobs of negativism and adverse acolytes of authoritarianism.
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.