Famous Great Depression Photographs

These are the pictures that taught later generations what the Great Depression looked like, from the crowd outside the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929 to a cotton picker in Arizona in November 1940. They run in date order, so the crisis moves from Wall Street to the breadlines, the shack towns, the Dust Bowl and the migrant roads west. Most were made by the photographers of the federal Historical Section, which began under the Resettlement Administration in 1935 and moved to the Farm Security Administration in 1937: Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn and Marion Post Wolcott. News, city and government archive photos fill in the scenes they did not cover, and Margaret Bourke-White's Louisville flood picture is here because few images hold the decade's contradictions in a single frame. Each caption gives the photographer where the record names one, with the place and date the archive records.