The Recession..."What's that?"

According to the New York Times, "a major new survey of American artists and how they are weathering the economic downturn has found that slightly more than half experienced a drop in income from 2008 to 2009, a blow to an already struggling group, two thirds of whose members reported that they earned less than $40,000 last year."Even worse according to the survey, 18% of those who responded said their income had dropped 50 percent or more in the last year.

So what's the good news? Well...if we take the Pollyanna view of life, it's not bad news. Artists live in a recession all the time, so this is just business as usual. Heart warming, no?



From the Library of Congress FSA Collection of Depression Era photographs, hitching north for work by Jack Delano.

And while we're on the subject...

The Library of Congress is getting very technorati, putting some of its images up on Flickr. These are more of my favorites both by Dorothea Lange. The "Migrant Mother" is probably the most famous photograph to come out of the WPA project. The WPA (Works Project Administration) provided jobs for photographers and artists, documenting the depression and doing public work projects.

I love the other Lange image here. To me, "Toward Los Angeles" is a perfect expression of depression era America.