Arthur Rothstein
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
photographer.
Rothstein is recognized as one of America’s premier photojournalists. During a career that spanned five decades, he provoked, entertained and informed the American people. His photographs ranged from a hometown baseball game to the drama of war, from struggling rural farmers to US Presidents.
Mr. Rothstein was born in Manhattan and he grew up in the Bronx. He was a graduate of Columbia University, where he was a founder of the University Camera Club and photography editor of the Columbian. Following his graduation from Columbia during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
Mr. Rothstein was invited to Washington DC by one of his professors at Columbia Roy Stryker
Roy Stryker
Roy Emerson Stryker was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He is most famous for heading the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression and launching the documentary photography movement of the FSA.After serving in the infantry...
. Rothstein had been Stryker's student at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in the early 1930s. In 1934, as a college senior, he prepared a set of copy photographs for a picture source book on American agriculture that Stryker and another professor, Rexford Tugwell
Rexford Tugwell
Rexford Guy Tugwell was an agricultural economist who became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first "Brain Trust," a group of Columbia academics who helped develop policy recommendations leading up to Roosevelt's 1932 election as President...
were assembling. The book was never published, but before the year was out, Tugwell was part of FDR's New Deal brain trust. He hired Stryker and Stryker hired Rothstein to set up the darkroom for Stryker's Photo Unit of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration
Resettlement Administration
The Resettlement Administration was a U.S. federal agency that, between April 1935 and December 1936, relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government....
(RA), which became the Farm Security Administration
Farm Security Administration
Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal in the United States, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat American rural poverty...
(FSA) in 1937. Later, when the country geared up for World War ll, the FSA became part of the Office of War Information (OWI).
Arthur Rothstein became the first photographer sent out by Roy Stryker, the head of the Photo Unit. During the next five years he shot some of the most significant photographs ever taken of rural and small-town America. He and other FSA photographer, including Esther Bubley
Esther Bubley
Esther Bubley was an American photographer who specialized in expressive photos of ordinary people in everyday lives.-Biography:...
, Marjory Collins, Mary Post Wolcott, Walker Evans
Walker Evans
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
, Russell Lee
Russell Lee (photographer)
Russell Lee was an American photographer and photojournalist.Lee had trained as a chemical engineer, and in the fall of 1936 became a member of the team of photographers assembled under Roy Stryker for the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration documentation project...
, Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was a groundbreaking American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist and film director...
, Jack Delano
Jack Delano
Jack Delano was an American photographer for the Farm Security Administration and a composer noted for his use of Puerto Rican folk material.- Biography :...
, Charlotte Brooks, John Vachon
John Vachon
-External links:*...
, Carl Mydans
Carl Mydans
Carl Mydans was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration and Life magazine....
, Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration...
and Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.-Biography:...
, were employed to publicize the living conditions of the rural
Rural
Rural areas or the country or countryside are areas that are not urbanized, though when large areas are described, country towns and smaller cities will be included. They have a low population density, and typically much of the land is devoted to agriculture...
poor in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
The photographs made during Rothstein's five-year stint with the photographic section form a catalog of the agency's initiatives. His first assignment was to document the lives of some Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
farmers who were being evicted to make way for the Shenandoah National Park
Shenandoah National Park
Shenandoah National Park encompasses part of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the U.S. state of Virginia. This national park is long and narrow, with the broad Shenandoah River and valley on the west side, and the rolling hills of the Virginia Piedmont on the east...
and about to be relocated by the Resettlement Administration, and subsequent trips took him to the Dust Bowl
Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936...
and to cattle
Cattle
Cattle are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos primigenius...
ranches in Montana
Montana
Montana is a state in the Western United States. The western third of Montana contains numerous mountain ranges. Smaller, "island ranges" are found in the central third of the state, for a total of 77 named ranges of the Rocky Mountains. This geographical fact is reflected in the state's name,...
.
The immediate incentive for his February 1937 assignment came from the interest generated by congressional consideration of farm tenant legislation sponsored in the Senate by John H. Bankhead
John H. Bankhead
John Hollis Bankhead was a U.S. senator from the state of Alabama.-Biography:He was born on September 13, 1842. He was appointed, then elected, to serve out the remainder of the term left by the death of John Tyler Morgan, and was later re-elected twice. He served in the Senate from June 18, 1907...
, a moderate Democrat from Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
with a strong interest in agriculture. Enacted in July, the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act gave the agency its new lease on life as the Farm Security Administration.
Gee's Bend
Beverly Smith
Beverly Smith in Cleveland, Ohio is a Black feminist health advocate, writer, academic, theorist and activist who is also the twin sister of writer, publisher, activist and academic Barbara Smith...
had told him about a tenant community at Gee's Bend, Alabama
Gee's Bend, Alabama
Boykin, also known as Gee's Bend, is an African American majority community and census-designated place in a large bend of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama. As of the 2010 census, its population was 275...
, "the most primitive set-up he has ever heard of. Their houses are of mud and stakes which they hew themselves." Smith was preparing an article on tenancy for the July issue of The American Magazine, but Stryker sensed bigger possibilities, telling Rothstein, "We could do a swell story; one that LIFE
Life
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate...
will grab." Stryker planned to visit Alabama and asked Rothstein to wait for him, but he was never able to make the trip and Rothstein went to Gee's Bend alone.
The residents of Gee's Bend symbolized two different things to the Resettlement Administration. On the one hand, reports about the community prepared by the agency describe the residents as isolated and primitive, people whose speech, habits, and material culture reflected an Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
n origin and an older way of life. On the other hand, the agency's agenda for rehabilitation implied a view of the residents as the victims of slavery and the farm-tenant system on a former plantation
Plantation
A plantation is a long artificially established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption...
. The two perceptions may be seen as related: if these tenants — despite their primitive culture— could benefit from training and financial assistance, their success would demonstrate the efficacy of the programs.
Unlike the subjects of many Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration photographs, the people of Gee's Bend are not portrayed as victims. The photographs do not show the back-breaking work of cultivation and harvest, but only offer a glimpse of spring plowing. At home, the residents do not merely inhabit substandard housing but are engaged in a variety of domestic activities. The dwellings at Gee's Bend must have been as uncomfortable as the frame shacks thrown up for farm workers everywhere, but Rothstein's photographs emphasize the log cabins' picturesque qualities. This affirming image of life in Gee's Bend is reinforced by Rothstein's deliberate, balanced compositions which lend dignity to the people being pictured.
There does not seem to have been a LIFE magazine story about Gee's Bend, but a long article ran in the New York Times Magazine of 22 August 1937. It is illustrated by eleven of Rothstein's pictures, with a text that draws heavily upon a Resettlement Administration report dated in May. The story extols the agency's regional director as intelligent and sympathetic and describes the Gee's Bend project in glowing terms. Reporter John Temple Graves II perceived the project as retaining agrarian — and African — values.
In 1940, Mr. Rothstein became a staff photographer for Look magazine but left shortly thereafter to join the OWI and then the US Army as a photographer in the Signal Corps. His military assignment took him to the China-Burma-India theatre and he remained in China following his discharge from the military in 1945, working as chief photographer for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, documenting the Great Famine and the plight of displaced survivors of the Holocaust in the Hongkew ghetto of Shanghai.
In 1947 Mr. Rothstein rejoined Look as Director of Photography. He remained at Look until 1971 when the magazine ceased publication. Mr. Rothstein joined Parade magazine in 1972 as Director of Photography and remained there until his death.
He was the author of numerous magazine articles and a staff columnist for US Camera and Modern Photography magazines and the New York Times. Mr. Rothstein wrote and published nine books.
Mr. Rothstein’s photographs are in permanent collections throughout the world and have appeared in numerous exhibitions. A selection of this one-man shows include shows at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester NY the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Photokina, Cologne, Germany; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Royal Photographic Society, London, England, as well as traveling exhibitions for the United States Information Service and for Parade magazine.
He was a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and a Spencer Chair Professor at SI Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. Mr. Rothstein was also on the faculties of Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, NY, and the Parsons School of Design in New York City and he took great pride in mentoring young photographers including Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Kirkland and Chester Higgins, Jr.
A recipient of more than 35 awards in photojournalism and a former juror for the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Rothstein was also a founder and former officer of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP). Arthur Rothstein Died on November 11, 1985. To learn more about Arthur Rothstein and view more of his photographs, visit arthurrothsteinarchive.com.