Photographing the Great Depression, then and now | Jonathan Jones

Dorothea Lange portrait marked poverty-Americans in the 1930s seems awfully contemporary

sides of the Great Depression of 1929 and its implications are disturbing the 21st century. Wall Street brokers fleeing from the floor in panic, or to their cars for sale, as he burst suddenly appear in old black and white along with the analysis of the current market authorities composed of dark. Not only the collapse of investor confidence that erupted 82 years ago, but long years of misery that followed now seem to call us, warn us, show us a truth that is urgent and immediate. Is this really the case? Perhaps the history of recurring nightmare?

This week an American newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, published one of the most recognized of all the pictures of depression. Dorothea Lange worked in 1936 to a U.S. government agency called the Resettlement Administration, documenting the journeys of laborers desperate for work. In Nipomo, California Florence Owens Thompson met and their children. Lange photos of the road weary family has endured because it is a human being intimate portrait, which runs through abstractions and statistics show real life in the Great Depression. The weathered face stoic, dignified Thompson bury their children in their protection, speaks of poverty is not intended or deserved, or inevitable, the people whose suffering is random, cruel, and certainly avoidable.

outside of the Great Depression in the United States and Europe in 1930 reached a broad agreement that the company had to do better, that markets can not guarantee universal wealth and even their very survival themselves, governments have had to do two things as a matter or course: managing the economy and well-being of citizens. At least the Western democracies came to this consensus in 1945, after 16 years of chaos, where the most dangerous alternative to capitalism has taken the world by surprise. Lange was amazing photography in 1936, he revealed that extreme poverty was already at an alarming scale in the United States, the country where wealth was more free, more high-tech industry, whose activities been undertaken. If capitalism is not the United States, this meant he was finished?

In 1936 when this photo was taken, many believed the right of Karl Marx in his prediction that capitalism would be broken by its contradictions. He looked with admiration for Russia, or even joined the Communist parties. Meanwhile, Hitler's Germany, Jews blamed the financial problems and created jobs through massive government programs. Liberal democracy, the strength of capitalism returns only the consensus of well-being and planning new ones that emerged from World War II.

The face of Florence Owens Thompson Lange's photograph is surrounded by the shadows of this dark period of history. So why do they appear in the Los Angeles Times the other day on the breakfast tables of film producers and management of television? The article wonders why today's artists have accepted the challenge of representing what he said and a new depression - which is our Dorothea Lange? However, the real question seems to be why we suddenly find images of 1930 relevant and recognizable and contemporary ....

The raw images of the crash of 1929 and the 1930 crisis that we face now are feeling the night terrors, nerves, nervous. They express something essential about the state of the world in 2011. Fear

• Nothing is more frightening than the idea that we could repeat the story of the 1930s. There is a terrifying period of human history. The economic difficulties of the moment broken societies. The Americans suffered catastrophic poverty, as shown in the photo of Lange. Germans succumbed to the politics of hate, Spain has become a battlefield, would soon be a Europe. All that is mentioned in the photographs cooling time of the Depression.

is a moment of sweat and nerves. During the summer, the financial news is strange. As usual, the nightmare scenarios have not yet come to pass - some had forecast a decline of the euro in August. The threat to Washington not to raise the debt ceiling in America was one of panic averted at the last minute. But fears remain.

Fear is a historical force. At the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, farmers have been driven to violence by a "great fear", a panic that spread through the countryside. He was, of course, during the Great Depression that President Franklin D. Roosevelt made his famous speech denouncing the irrational fear. He used his inaugural address in 1933 to encourage "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasonable and unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance"

Here's something really strange - what we have in common with the people of the Great Depression is a mood of fear deepening, "nameless, irrational ..."
United States in 1933, Roosevelt was faced with fear and insisted that rational measures could defy the forces of destruction. Moreover, the same year Hitler came to power with a policy of the party of unreason pure terror.

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