Photographs of the Great Depression. Yonge Street Mission During the 1930s the Yonge Street Mission feed and clothed thousands of people The daily consumption.

Photographs of the Great Depression

Yonge Street Mission • During the 1930s the Yonge Street Mission feed and clothed

thousands of people• The daily consumption was 5,600 beef sandwiches, 80 gallons

of tea, and 26 gallons of milk. • “ There is a constant drain on our resources, as they come from

morning until night with their heartaches and troubles. Some hungry one wants a meal, another poor soul comes with a racking cough, having walked the streets all through a zero night, or perhaps a mother comes in with her little one for food and clothing. One way or another we try to meet all the demands thus put upon us. This winter we have furnished 12,500 meals and 75,000 beef sandwiches, and used 1,500 gallons of cream for coffee… we would give nothing away that we would not eat ourselves.”

Job Bureau

• Unemployed men vying for jobs at the American Legion Employment Bureau in Los Angeles during the Great Depression. (1934)

• In Canada, unemployment reached 27% in 1933

• 1 in 5 Canadians became dependent upon government relief for survival

Toward Los Angeles• An estimated 2.5 million Americans and 300 000

Canadians abandoned their home during the Depression in favour of the road

• In 1932, Bennett sanctioned the creation of a nationwide system of camps to house and provide work for single, unemployed, homeless Canadian males

• In return for bunkhouse residence, 3 meals a day, work clothes, medical care and 20 cents a day, the "Royal Twenty Centers" worked 44-hr weeks clearing bush, building roads, planting trees and constructing public buildings

Father and Sons• The drought that crippled agricultural production

by 1934 also created a series of dust storms causing massive agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands (Dust Bowl)

• Caused by severe drought conditions coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation or other techniques that prevented erosion

• During the drought, soil dried out, became dust, and blew away eastwards and southwards, in large black clouds.

The Family Farm • Prairie dry belt was unwisely opened for

homesteading and was struck by successive droughts in the 1920s

• 33% of Canada’s Gross National Income derived from exports and therefore devastated by the collapse in world trade

• In Saskatchewan, plagued by crop failures and the lowest price for wheat in recorded history, total provincial income plummeted by 90% within 2 years, forcing 2/3rds of the rural population onto relief

Migrant Mother• Dorthea Lange (1936) Nipomo, California• Lange was a famous and influential

photojournalist who was hired by the U.S. government to capture the consequences and tragedy of the Depression era

• Image is one of a series of five exposures of a destitute family in a pea picker's camp after the failure of the early pea crop

• They were preparing to trade their tent for food

Migrant Mother

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).