Arthur Rothstein American, 1915-1985

Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985) was one of America’s premier photojournalists, working across five decades, and the first photographer hired by the Farm Security Administration, whose photographic archive he helped build. More than eleven thousand of his photographs are held in the public archive at the Library of Congress. Steer Skull, made in the South Dakota Badlands in 1936, and Farmer and Sons Walking in the Face of a Dust Storm, made in the Oklahoma Panhandle that April, are among the defining images of the Depression. The latter is his best-known photograph and one of the defining images of the Dust Bowl.

Born in New York in 1915 to Jewish immigrant parents and raised in the Bronx, Rothstein studied at Columbia University during the early years of the Depression. He founded the University Camera Club and served as photography editor of the yearbook. At Columbia, he came to know Roy Stryker, an economics instructor who was soon appointed to lead the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration, created to document the economic dislocation of the Depression and the displacement of farming communities.

Stryker hired Rothstein in 1935 as the section’s first staff photographer, drawn as much to his technical proficiency as to his enthusiasm. Rothstein established the darkroom and spent the next five years working alongside Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn, traveling throughout the country to photograph the Dust Bowl, sharecroppers, and the rural South. His work was praised for its directness and immediacy.

Rothstein left the FSA in 1940 for Look magazine and later served as a Signal Corps photographer in Europe, India, and Burma. In 1946 and 1947, he was chief photographer for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in China, where he documented the Shanghai Hongkew ghetto and the devastating consequences of famine. He returned to Look as director of photography, a position he held until the magazine ceased publication in 1971, and subsequently became director of photography at Parade.

Rothstein was a founding member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers and taught at Columbia University and Syracuse University. He also invented the X-O-Graph three-dimensional printing process and wrote several influential books on photojournalism and photographic technique that were widely used in teaching. He died in New Rochelle in 1985 at the age of seventy. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented his work in In Sequence (2025), Summer Glow (2024), and REWIND (2021).