Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936-1942

Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott became some of the United States' best-known photographers through their pictures of Depression-era America. Their assignment, as one of their associates described it, was to have "a long look at the whole vast, complicated rural U.S. landscape with all that was built on it and all those who built and wrecked and worked in it and bore kids and dragged them up and played games and paraded and picnicked and suffered and died and were buried in it." In Montana the four photographers traveled to forty of the state's fifty-six counties, creating a rich record of the many facets of the Depression and recovery: rural and urban, agricultural and industrial, work and play, hard times and the promise of a brighter future. The photographers captured the dignity of Montanans as they struggled to scratch out livings from dried-up fields, nurture families in the shadows of Butte head frames, and foster communities on the vast expanses of the northern plains. Hope in Hard Times, features over 140 Farm Security Administration photographs to illustrate the story of the Great Depression in Montana and the experiences of the photographers who documented it. Today these striking images, from cities like Butte to small towns like Terry, present an unforgettable portrait of a little-studied period in the history of Montana. Selected from the Farm Security Administration Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the photographs in Hope in Hard Times offer viewers an unparalleled look at life in Montana in the years preceding the United States' entry into World War II.