Composite created from Russell Lee’s 1937 photographs of the Kramer family and the Williston area. Original photographs: Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress.
In October 1937, Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee arrived near Williston, North Dakota, and spent time with farmer Joe Kramer’s family.
The more photographs I find from that visit, the less this looks like a simple Depression-era portrait session.
Lee did something much more valuable.
He documented a household.
He photographed Joe Kramer. He photographed his wife. He photographed their children. He photographed the house, the outbuildings, the horses, the interior rooms, the dishes, the beds, the water supply and the land itself.
He even photographed the dust.
Taken together, the pictures become something close to a walk through one family’s life in western North Dakota in 1937.
Joe Kramer
One of Lee’s portraits shows Kramer standing in front of the house.
His cap is worn. His jacket hangs loosely over overalls that have been patched and torn through long use. In another photograph, he stands with a rifle resting upright in front of him, his hands folded over it.
There is nothing theatrical about him.
He looks like a working farmer who has stopped what he was doing long enough for a stranger to make a photograph.
In the family portrait, Kramer stands at one end of the group. His wife and their three children stand beside him.
The building behind them is plain board construction. The ground in front is bare. A barrel sits beside the house.
Even without knowing anything else about the Kramers, the photograph plainly shows a family living with very limited material resources.
But the rest of Lee’s photographs tell us much more.
Go Inside the House
The exterior portrait is only the beginning.
Lee went inside.
That changes everything.
The inside walls are rough boards covered with peeling paint. Beds fill much of the available space. Clothing and blankets are piled where they can be kept. A large piece of furniture—a cabinet-style, hand-cranked phonograph, very likely from the 1910s–1920s—stands against one wall, with hats, containers, and other belongings stacked on top.
This is not a house photographed after somebody cleaned it for company.
It appears to be the house as it was lived in.
One of the Kramer boys sits on a bed across from the hand-cranked phonograph, absorbed in something small in his hands. He is not performing for Lee. He seems barely concerned with the photographer.
Another child is busy beside a large metal milk can.
The Farm Security Administration caption tells us exactly what he is doing: dipping water from it.
That one detail may tell us more about the Kramer household than almost anything else in the series.
Water didn’t come conveniently from a kitchen faucet.
They stored it in a milk can and dipped it out when needed.
Mrs. Kramer at Work
Lee also photographed Mrs. Kramer inside the house.
She stands at a rough wooden work surface with cups, plates, cans and household items crowded around her. The walls behind her are badly worn.
And yet the scene is orderly.
There are dishes stacked together.
There are cups.
There are containers for food.
There is a clock.
Nothing about the photograph suggests surrender.
That distinction is important.
Poverty and disorder are not the same thing.
The Kramer home was poor, certainly by almost any measure we would use today, but these photographs also show people maintaining a household with what they had.
Someone washed those dishes.
Someone prepared meals.
Someone carried the water.
Someone made the beds.
Someone kept the children dressed.
The work of keeping a family together continued regardless of what the economy or the weather was doing outside.
The Daughter
Lee seems to have photographed one of the Kramer daughters several times.
In one picture she sits next to a bed.
The Library of Congress title for this photo says that her dwarfed arm is probably due to infantile paralysis. This is a former historical name for poliomyelitis (commonly known as polio).
In another she stands near the door, holding what appears to be a rough wooden latch or bar.
Her dress is plain. Her stockings are worn. Heavy shoes cover her feet.
Then there is another photograph outside.
Her mother stands beside the house. A dog sits near her feet.
The girl is laughing.
That photograph may be one of the most important in the entire series.
It would have been easy for Russell Lee to photograph only solemn children and worried adults. Such pictures fit our modern visual idea of the Great Depression.
But life did not work that way.
Children laughed in 1937.
They played.
They got bored.
They irritated their brothers.
They followed dogs around.
They probably complained about chores.
The Great Depression was happening to them, but it was not the only thing happening to them.
They were also growing up.
What Was Home?
A wider photograph answers a question the close pictures cannot.
What did the Kramer farm actually look like?
Very little, by conventional standards.
Their house is a long, low wooden structure sitting almost alone on the open land.
There are no shade trees.
No landscaped yard.
No substantial barn visible beside it.
No lush fields stretching toward the horizon.
A pile of material sits on the ground. A barrel lies nearby. Other barrels and miscellaneous objects stand around the entrance.
The building looks temporary.
Perhaps it was not intended to be, but that is how it appears.
Another structure on the property is photographed separately.
Calling it a building is generous.
It appears partly dug into the earth and assembled from lumber, sheet material, and whatever else could be made useful. Its low roof has been patched repeatedly.
It is the sort of structure that reminds us that people who had little money rarely threw away anything that might have another use.
A board was not junk.
A piece of metal was not junk.
A barrel was not junk.
Those things might become tomorrow’s repair.
And Then There Was the Dust
The Kramer photographs become more understandable when placed beside Russell Lee’s photographs of the countryside around Williston during the same October.
In one, horses stand close together beside a small farm building.
Behind them, the world disappears.
Dust has swallowed the horizon.
A windmill is still visible, but only faintly.
In another photograph, farm buildings and a water tower appear as ghostly shapes beneath a strange, bright sky.
The landscape seems to dissolve into gray.
This was not merely bad weather.
Years of drought had damaged the northern Great Plains. Crops failed. Pastures suffered. Exposed soil became vulnerable to the wind.
The ground visible in Lee’s photographs tells the story.
Much of it is bare.
Vegetation is sparse.
Little can stop loose soil once the wind begins to move it.
For Joe Kramer, that soil was not scenery.
It was his livelihood.
The Horses
One of Lee’s strongest photographs shows the Kramer landscape—or at least the same drought-stricken country around Williston—with several horses gathered beside a shed in the dust.
They almost seem to be waiting.
The shed offers some shelter, but there is nowhere to escape the dust itself.
The photograph is quiet enough that, without the caption, you might first mistake the haze for fog.
It isn’t.
That distinction changes the whole image.
Fog eventually burns away and leaves the land untouched.
Dust blowing away from a farm takes part of the farm with it.
A Rifle, a Milk Can and a Clock
What strikes me most about this expanded group of photographs is how ordinary the objects are.
Joe’s rifle.
A milk can filled with water.
The iron beds.
A wash basin.
A stack of dishes.
A clock.
A dog.
A barrel.
A patched roof.
None of these things was placed there to explain the Great Depression.
They were simply there.
That is why they work so well.
Lee did not need to construct a story.
The objects already contained one.
The milk can tells us something about water.
The beds tell us something about space.
The patched clothing tells us something about money.
The rough outbuilding tells us something about making do.
The bare earth tells us something about drought.
And the little girl laughing tells us something statistics never can.
Russell Lee Stayed Long Enough
This is where Russell Lee’s way of working becomes especially important.
A photographer could have made the family portrait and left.
It would have been a good photograph.
We would have seen a poor farm family in North Dakota during the Depression and understood the general idea.
But Lee kept photographing.
That transformed the Kramers from an example into people.
We see Joe alone.
We see him with his family.
We see Mrs. Kramer doing household work.
We see the children inside.
We see where they slept.
We see how they got water.
We see the house from a distance.
We see the outbuildings.
We see the animals.
And we see the weather bearing down on all of it.
That is documentary photography at its best.
Not one photograph pretending to explain everything.
A collection of small truths.
October 1937
By the time Russell Lee reached the Kramer farm, the country had been living with the Great Depression for eight years.
The Kramers had also lived through several years of severe drought and life was probably hard before that.
They did not know that another world war was only a few years away.
They did not know that the American economy would soon change dramatically.
They did not know that photographs made on their farm would still be examined nearly ninety years later.
They were simply living there.
Joe had a farm to worry about.
Mrs. Kramer had a household to run.
The children had water to carry and chores to do.
The horses needed care.
Winter was coming.
And somewhere outside the house, dust was moving across North Dakota.
Russell Lee happened to arrive with a camera.
Because he did, we have more than a photograph of a poor family from long ago.
We have their rooms.
Their yard.
Their possessions.
Their faces.
Their dog.
Their horses.
Their worn clothing and patched buildings.
And for a few frames, even their laughter.
That is what makes this series remarkable.
The Kramers do not remain anonymous figures from the Great Depression.
For a little while, they become a family again.
Photographs by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration, October 1937, near Williston in Williams County, North Dakota. Images preserved in the Library of Congress Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection.
