Where are the economic depression photos?

There has been no shortage of words in the media about the nation’s economic depression — editorials, news articles, political messages, opinion pieces and blogs — but relatively few powerful images of these difficult times have emerged.
The Great Depression, which followed the 1929 crash of Wall Street, was chronicled by famous writers like John Steinbeck whose book, The Grapes of Wrath, was later made into a movie. The era was also recorded by photographers like Dorothea Lange, whose black-and-white images of sharecroppers, pea pickers, migrant farmers and dust bowl refugees are indelibly etched into the nation’s collective memory. The faces captured by Lange’s lens were often found at soup kitchens, in bread lines and fields, and along dusty roadsides, broken men with bindlestiffs over their shoulders. Food handout lines wrapped around city blocks.
Images of this caliber seemingly have not emerged over the past decade, and while the Occupy Wall Street movement generated countless news pictures, these didn’t tell the larger story of a nation in peril.
Perhaps the face of economic suffering has become less visible. Consider this: Most people receiving government unemployment benefits obtain them by pressing a few numbers on their cell phones key pad to file a weekly claim. Checks arrive in the mail. The benefits system also allows filing via the Internet and offers the option of direct deposit. Those on food-assistance programs are issued plastic cards instead of food coupons to eliminate embarrassment at the grocery checkout.
Consider this: Factories seldom shut down in a single day. The trend is to slowly downsize until no employees remain. It’s much more difficult to capture this with a camera.
Some days, words alone are not enough.