Amy Roh/Hastings Tribune
Brooke Busboom takes a picture at Hastings
Museum during Chautauqua's Iconic Images
Youth Camp Wednesday. Photographs by the
participants will be added to the Nebraska
Humanities Council Web site

Students try to capture new iconic images
Charis Ubben
cubben@hastingstribune.com
For Betty Kort’s 91-year-old father and 87-year-old mother, the Great Depression is a memory that won’t go away.
“Both of them spent their teenage years in the Depression,” Kort said. “I think that everyone who came through that period, that 1930s Depression period, is marked for life.”
Wednesday, the Great Depression was the starting point of an Iconic Images photography workshop presented to local high schoolers, sponsored by the Nebraska Humanities Council as part of Chautauqua. Three high school girls — Skyler Hinrichs, Brooke Busboom and Coral Crosier — attended as aspiring photographers.
Kort, who just retired as director of the Cather Foundation in Red Cloud and whose own photographs are touring with an exhibit right now, led the class with Hastings College photography teacher and Houchin Photo Arts owner Rick Houchin. They used 1930s photographs from Hastings and across the country — specifically of the Depression and Dust Bowl — to give examples of good icon photography.
The Depression period created a series of photographs that are among the most famous in American history, such as Dorothea Lange’s image of a wrinkled and dirty 32-year-old mother who sits in the doorway of her tent, a baby in her arms and a young child leaning on each shoulder.
Photographers had been commissioned to record visual effects of the Depression and Dust Bowl that, when viewed by people on the coasts, would spur the government to offer them relief.
Kort reviewed the stock market crash of 1929, the drought and subsequent Dust Bowl of 1930-1936 and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1933 plan to help his country, the New Deal.
With the New Deal came FDR’s Works Progress Administration, which handed out federally funded work opportunities to those who would not otherwise have found employment. The program touched Hastings with two big projects, Kort said, the Burlington underpass and Fisher Fountain.
“Fisher Fountain became for people a symbol of hope,” Kort said.
It also became an icon.
An icon is anything that is symbolic of a culture or a time, Kort and Houchin agreed. Architecture, people, animated characters — they can all become icons.
“They record a moment in history. A glimpse of something that means something to us,” Houchin said.

To read more, see Thursday's Hastings Tribune or the Tribune's e-edition.