Americans during the Great Depression

Since the onset of the recession in 2007, pundits have compared the crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s - but this week's release of 1,000 photographs from that bygone era serves as a reminder of how truly harsh that period was.

All of the black-and-white photos that were made available online by the New York Public Library were taken in the 1930s and 1940s under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) – an agency created in 1935 as part of the New Deal policy to combat rural poverty.

The New York Times has reported that Roy Stryker, founder of the FSA’s photography project, was determined to compile a visual encyclopaedia of Depression-era U.S. and preserve it for future generations.

Downtrodden: Children of migrant fruit worker in Berrien County, Michigan

Homeless: Squatters camping on a highway near Bakersfield, California, in 1935

Hard-knock life: A California fruit 'tramp' was photographed with his family in a migrant camp in Marysville in 1935

Destitute: Children sitting on the steps of a dilapidated house in Michigan in June of 1937

Backbreaking work: Many farmers who lost their land in the crisis were forced to become sharecroppers to eke out a meager living

Documented: The photographs were taken by the Farm Security Administration that was combating rural poverty

Quality control: Department of Agriculture officials testing meats at Beltsville, Maryland, in 1935

Bleak: Dust bowl refugees photographed along a highway near Bakersfield, California, in 1935

Crisis: In 1932, the unemployment rate was at 24.9 per cent, and millions of people were homeless and living in shantytowns

Down-and-out: Mother and father and several children of a family of nine living in open field in rough board covering built on old Ford chassis on U.S. Route 70, between Bruceton and Camden, Tennessee

Bygone era: A family of eight living in a four-bedroom home in El Monte, California, paying $16.20 rent a month

Jobless: At the height of the Great Depression, as many as 15 million Americans were unemployed

Wayward: Migrant family in Kern County, California, in 1936

Hovels: Houses of African-Americans in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1936