Iconic Images and Hard Times
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony before Congress was so gloomy today about the economy’s future that it got me thinking about images that define the times. Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph of an impoverished California migrant mother and her children remains the iconic image of the Great Depression.
What should illustrate the mess we’re in now? A foreclosure sign doesn’t really cover it. Via Housing Wire, Peter Viles of The Los Angeles Times offers these images: People waiting in a long line to buy a house in Simi Valley, just five short years ago, and people waiting in another long line on Monday, to get their money out of failed lender IndyMac. Here’s yet another bank run image, this one from the Orange County Register, of an elderly woman wiping her forehead and sitting down after nearly fainting while waiting in an IndyMac bank line.
It’s hard to remember, or maybe we’ve just blanked out on it deliberately, but this was the iconic image exactly a decade ago.
