Pictures of the Dust Bowl
Farid Haddad

Much of what Americans remember about the Dust Bowl comes from photographs. The government hired photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein to document the lives of farm families during the Depression, and their pictures became some of the most famous images in American history.

Rothstein's photograph of a farmer and his two sons walking through a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, shows a half-buried shed and a landscape with almost no plants in it. The father leans into the wind while the smallest boy covers his face. The picture tells the story of the Dust Bowl without a single word.

Lange's portrait known as Migrant Mother was taken in a pea pickers' camp in California. The woman in the photograph was not actually from the plains, but the image came to stand for all the families who had lost their homes during those years. Her worried expression and the children leaning on her shoulders made the suffering of the Depression feel personal.

These photographs had a practical purpose. The agencies that paid for them wanted to convince Congress and the public that the government's relief programs were necessary. In that sense they were a kind of advertising. But they were also honest records of real people, and they helped Americans understand what was happening in parts of the country they had never seen.

When I look at these pictures today, I notice how much they leave out. We rarely see the farmers who made money during the boom years, or the land speculators who encouraged them. Photographs can reveal the truth, but they can also shape which parts of the truth we remember.
