Getty Museum
Car with Hat on Pole, near Visalia, Tulare County, California
Creator
Horace BristolAmerican Photographer · 1908–1997
All works by this person →Horace Bristol and his photographs were nearly forgotten to history until one day in 1985, when his son asked if he had read John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. The question prompted Bristol to open a number of musty footlockers whose contents had been stowed away for decades. Inside were photographs that he had made half a century earlier while traveling through California's Central Valle
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1938
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
This jalopy and a makeshift tent of grubby blankets formed a home for the small boy staring out the car's window and his family. During the 1930s, such substandard living conditions were common. Another car, a tent, and a line of sheds can be seen in the distance. The Dust Bowl-a period of severe drought that struck the Great Plains of the United States in the early 1930s-and the Great Depression forced many Midwestern families off their land. In search of farm work, the only labor they knew, families headed west to California, Oregon, and Washington. Shantytowns like this, nicknamed Hoovervilles after the president blamed for the Depression, sprung up wherever people stopped in hope of work. Near the car's right front tire, a basin and washboard attest to this family's efforts to maintain some degree of cleanliness while living in squalor. Gift of the Horace and Masako Bristol Trust
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