'Hope and Despair': Depression-Era Photography of Arkansas on Exhibit in Mullins Library

Blind Street Musician; West Memphis, Arkansas. By Ben Shahn, October 1935.

Children of Rehabilitation Client; Maria Plantation, Arkansas. By Ben Shahn, October 1935.

Cotton Picker, Arkansas. By Ben Shahn, October 1935.

Wife and Child of Sharecropper, Mississippi Bottoms. By Russell Lee, May 1938.

Wife and Child of Tractor Driver. By Dorothea Lange, June 1937.

Photo Submitted

Wife and Child of Tractor Driver. (Photographed by Dorothea Lange, June 1937, Library of Congress.)

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Marjorie Hunter’s exhibit “Hope and Despair: FSA Photography in Arkansas during the Great Depression” is on display in the lobby area of Mullins Library in honor of Arkansas Heritage Month.

“Hope and Despair” is a collection of Farm Service Administration photographs taken in Arkansas during the 1930s. Marjorie Hunter, a Heritage Studies doctoral student at Arkansas State University-Jonesboro, developed the project using photographs from the Library of Congress archives under the direction of Dr. Clyde Milner II, director of the heritage studies program. These images illustrate the extreme poverty of the Depression era, which was exacerbated by flood, drought and low farm prices in Arkansas and the Mississippi River Delta.

“The photographs depict a wide range of emotion from hopefulness in the eyes of a child to despair carved in the faces of the adults,” Hunter said. “All of them show abject poverty and the desperation found in being a sharecropper during the Great Depression.”

The Farm Security Administration was given the task of combatting rural poverty in America. Originally named the Resettlement Administration, it was created in 1935 as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal projects. The Farm Service Administration hired photographers to capture the need for the agency. The photography project evolved from documenting cash loans to farmers to recording the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the Midwest and the West. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording rural and urban conditions throughout the United States.

As “Chief of the Historical Section” for the Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker directed a team of photojournalists that included Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Edwin Locke, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott. His camera crew took thousands of pictures with the goal of “introducing America to Americans.” Members of the team, such as Lange, Evans, Rothstein and Shahn, gained reputations as leading creators of documentary photography.

“One reason I chose this group of photographs was to examine how these families developed a sense of reliance on the community during hard times,” Hunter explained. “These public-domain photographs allow us a glimpse into these forgotten lives.”

As a child, Hunter lived in many different countries and grew up hearing her grandmother tell stories about farm life during the Great Depression. Hunter graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history from California State University-Bakersfield, an area where many Oklahoma migrants settled during the 1930s. Hunter moved to Arkansas in 2000 and began a master’s program in heritage studies at Arkansas State University-Jonesboro. Her work with the Farm Security Administration photographs reflects her interests in both migrant studies and women’s lives during the Great Depression. This exhibit showcases selected images from her doctoral dissertation, Hope and Despair: The Farm Security Administration Photographs in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression.

“Hope and Despair” will be on display in Mullins Library through the end of June.