Glimmer

In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor and didn't know it, and everybody was comfortable and did know it. 

 —Mark Twain

 Thurston County, western Washington 1939

 Children of tenant farmers, 1936

Klamath County, Oregon 1939

Photos: Dorothea Lange 

 Photographer Dorothea Lange is best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration that captured so completely the desperate conditions of migrant workers and displaced farm families. The women in her photographs are especially iconic; worn and drawn yet tending to their children. There are other photos, the ones you don't see as often, that illustrate the scrappy optimism during hard times. The children are captured in their casual camaradery with 

genuine smiles and impish grins.