This 1936 photograph of an Alabama sharecropper family was taken by Walker Evans, a photographer for the Resettlement Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The purpose of this family portrait was documenting the poverty of rural American families during the Depression to generate support for controversial government resettlement efforts.
This is one of several photographs of the family and house of Bud Fields available through the Library of Congress. The two-room house had a wood stove, very little furniture, and few material comforts. Many poor or rural American families lived in pre-industrial homes long after modern home conveniences were available in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Walker Evans, Photographer. “Sharecropper Bud Fields and his family at home in Hale County, Alabama.” 1936. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Image featured in Investigating Family, Food, and Housing Themes in Social Studies by Cynthia Resor
This picture is good to use when showing children today in schools how different types of families lived in the past. I could compare pictures of wealthy families and working, lower class families. There are lots of good children’s books I could use – Children of the Great Depression by Russell Freedman or The Gardener by Sarah Stewart
I really like this image because it shows the conditions of families living in poverty in American history. This house looks like a small house for the amount of people shown in the picture.
Wow, what a jarring photograph! This is great to illustrate the effect of the Depression!
I like this image because it would be a good image to use when talking about rural America or poverty during the Depression. You can see the clothes they wore, what the looked like, how a family functioned, and what a house looked like!
I find this photo interesting because although it says that they are a working family, you can tell that they are not in the best living conditions. Their clothing looks old and used and they look dirty. You can also tell that this is a bigger family in more than likely a smaller home. I think this photo would be great to show your students to show the conditions that hard working families were in.
This picture could be used in the classroom to show students the toll the depression had on families. The students can analyze the family: their faces, their clothes, the home around them, how clean they are and so on. This could even be used in comparison to another picture from the same time of a different family that us doing better/worse.
This great photo to use to introduce the concept of poverty and socio-economic class.