so he set about creating a team of photographers.
Rothstein was the first to be offered a position with
a group of photographers that, to a great degree,
would come to define an era in U.S. history. In a
short time, photographers Walker Evans, Russell
Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and John Va-
chon were also working for Stryker and the Reset-
tlement Administration, later known as the Farm
Security Administration (FSA).
Rothstein enjoyed the freedom and mobility that
came with his FSA assignments, having little expe-
rience of the United States beyond New York City.
During his very first assignment in the Blue Ridge
Mountains of Virginia in 1935, Rothstein had the
chance to acquaint himself with the locals, gradually
gaining their trust and permission to photograph
them as unobtrusively as possible. Rothstein’s pho-
tographic vision was influenced not only by the di-
rectives about subject matter or feeling given by Roy
Stryker but also by the more experienced talent of
Walker Evans and Ben Shahn. Of their influence,
Rothsteinsaidduringanextensiveinterviewforthe
Smithsonian Archives of American Art:
[T]hey had very definite approaches; and it was not just
a question of making a picture, but making a picture that
had meaning. They made me very much aware of the
elements that go into photography—that go beyond just
the content of the picture—the elements of style, of
individual approach, of being able to see clearly, being
able to visualize ideas.
(Richard Doud, ‘‘Interview with Arthur Rothstein,’’ 20)
Gee’s Bend, Alabama [Artelia Bendolph] (1937)
remains among Rothstein’s most famous and lasting
photographs of the Great Depression. Juxtaposition
could be said to be one of the primary tropes of FSA
photography. Commonly, printed billboards, ad-
vertisements, and promises of prosperity served as a
backdrop to bread lines or, as with ‘‘Gee’s Bend,’’
functioned as insulation in the rural homes and
shacks of those hardest hit by the depression. Roth-
stein photographed the moment when a girl, Artelia
Bendolph, leans out beyond the frame of a cabin
window, bathing her face in sun in the direction of
a smattering of food advertisements, images which
addweighttothesenseofeconomicdesolationtothe
formal isolation of the picture. Photographs like
Gee’s BendandDust Storm, Cimarron County, Okla-
homawere published repeatedly throughout the late
1930s in such magazines asLook. Rothstein has said
of the latter image of a father and his sons enveloped
by swirling dust:
[I]t made people realize that here was as tragedy that
was affecting people—it wasn’t just affecting crops....This photograph had a great deal of influence on people
in the East, for example, who had no contact and no
sense of identity with this poor farmer walking across the
dusty soil on his farm in Oklahoma—it gave him a sense
of identity.
(RichardDoud,onlinetranscriptionof‘‘Interviewwith
Arthur Rothstein,’’ http://artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/
rothst64.htm)
Rothstein’sSkull, Bad Lands, South Dakotaalso
attained certain notoriety during his time with the
FSA, for it was this photograph that sparked poli-
tical accusations of fraud and fakery among New
Deal policies of the Democratic administration.
Rothstein’s own account of the photograph
stressed his formal and compositional experimenta-
tion; intrigued by the bleached skull, he spent the
better part of a day placing the skull against various
backdrops such as cracked earth, near cacti, and
grass. After filing these pictures with the FSA in
Washington where they were available free of
charge to any interested publication, one Asso-
ciated Press picture editor printed and captioned
the photograph of the skull on dry, parched earth
as an example of drought in the Western United
States. Editors and Republican politicians alike
soon claimed that the photograph represented an
abuse of information by the government, intending
to suggest conditions far worse than reality. The
other studies of the skull that were then discovered
in the files of the FSA only fueled the controversy,
since they seemed to prove Rothstein’s willing dis-
tortion of the facts. Long after attacks on New
Deal policies and officials had subsided, the story
of this photograph remains a telling example of the
tenuous boundary between document and propa-
ganda when photographs serve as mere illustra-
tions for any number of contexts.
When speaking of the impact of his time with the
FSA, Rothstein frequently cited the ways in which
the FSA photographs were part of new techniques
of visually based communication. The context of a
photograph could, as in the case of ‘‘Skull,’’ be
equally important as the image itself in determining
meaning. Rothstein understood the combined po-
tential of words and pictures, a phrase that provided
the title to one of his major catalogues. Working at
Lookfrom 1946 until the end of its run in 1971,
Rothstein perfected this conviction, taking photo-
graphs he hoped would have the power of social
commentary for a large audience. Throughout his
tenures atLookandParademagazine (1972–1985),
Rothstein’s belief in the communicative ability of
photographs inspired and informed his teaching
career at a number of universities. It also promptedROTHSTEIN, ARTHUR