Arthur Rothstein

Conchita Fernandes takes a look at the oeuvre of Arthur Rothstein, a photographer who created an indelible visual record of life in the U.S.

- Conchita Fernandes

Introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, as a way to help poor farmers, sharecroppers and migrant workers, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) is by far one of the most important and extensive visual records in American history. Roy Stryker, an economist, wasn’t exactly a photographer himself, but understood the compelling effect that photographs had on public consciousness, headed the FSA, and enlisted seventeen photographers to travel to different parts of the U.S. that were ravaged by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. This endeavour amounted to more than 200,000 photographs. While the pictures fulfilled its cursory role of raising awareness towards the dire state of the country and its citizens, it more importantly established the framework for the genre of documentary photography.

The FSA constituted some of the most prolific photographers in the history of the medium—Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn. However, the first photographer to be recruited to the agency was a 20-year-old medical student of Columbia University, Arthur Rothstein. Rothstein wasn’t a ‘professional’ photographer as Evans or Lange were, but came with some prior experience from having worked in the darkroom. He was also the founder of the Columbia University Camera Club. “I used photography as a means of supplementing my tuition, and I had many little projects that I worked on. I did photography for students who needed them for theses and dissertations,” he said. Born and raised in New York, Rothstein lacked the experience that the other FSA photographers had as a result of being out in the field. This would soon change.

Joining the Resettlement Administration