• About the Work of Art

• Activities for Farmer and Sons Walking in the Face of a Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936
   

Arthur Rothstein was an amateur photographer during his high school days in New York City, where he lived with his immigrant parents. After entering Columbia University to study medicine, he continued photography as a hobby and established the university’s first camera club. He never became a doctor, in part because of a class he took with economist Roy Stryker in 1934. Stryker was writing a book on agriculture and asked Rothstein to take some photographs for it. The next year, the head of the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA), asked Stryker to come to Washington to create FSA’s Historical Section and document its activities. FSA was a farm-aid organization that provided loans to farmers, sponsored land renewal programs, and assisted migrant workers. Rothstein recalled years later, “Because he was visually oriented, Roy decided that the best way to show the accomplishments of the FSA would be visually. He was a firm believer in the power of pictures.” Stryker’s unforeseen but invaluable contribution to American art was to hire a number of talented photographers to join the project.

Because of their earlier association, Stryker hired Rothstein as the FSA’s first photographer. Because Rothstein lacked the tuition for medical school, he went to Washington to accept the position. Other photographers who joined FSA had more experience than Rothstein and influenced him. Two of the most important were Walker Evans and Ben Shahn. Rothstein said of these two men:

Both of them contributed a great deal to my own development as a photographer in those days . . . . They made me very much aware of the elements that go into photography?those that go beyond just the content of the picture—the elements of style, of individual approach, of being able to see clearly, and being able to visualize ideas. I’m quite sure that these two people did more for my development as a photographer at that particular stage than any two photographers I can think of.

Starting in 1935 and for the next seven years, the FSA photographers fanned out across the United States. The photographs they took were emotional evidence of the widespread ruin that the Great Depression brought to rural areas. Eventually, the FSA photographers expanded their mission from recording rural scenes to creating what became a photographic survey of the entire United States.

Rothstein left the FSA in 1940 and joined the staff of Look magazine. But the outbreak of World War II led him immediately to an assignment with the United States Army Signal Corps in the Pacific. After the war he rejoined Look, where he served as director of photography until 1971. Rothstein was active in several press photography organizations and helped establish the American Society of Magazine Photographers. His last job was associate editor of Parade magazine from 1972 until his death thirteen years later.

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