Arthur Rothstein Colorado Photographs
Arthur Rothstein made some of the most significant documentary photographs ever taken of rural and small-town America.
These images were created during his years traveling throughout the nation on assignment for the US Farm Security Administration, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” agencies that restored and rebuilt an America devastated by the Great Depression.
In 1940, Rothstein joined the staff of Look magazine.
With the start of the WWll, Rothstein completed photojournalistic assignments for the US Army Signal Corps in China, Burma, and India.
After a short assignment for the United Nations, he returned to Look magazine, where he served as director of photography for 25 years during the Golden Age of post-war photo magazines.
He then held the same position for Parade magazine for 15 years, until his death in 1985.
During his years in magazine photojournalism Rothstein continued his own work, teaching, writing nine books as well as numerous newspaper and magazine columns on photography.
His photographs of America during the Great Depression were some of the most widely-published photographs of the 20th century, and are held in the collections of major museums around the world.
Newsboy on Main Street, Montrose, Colorado, 1939. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy of Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.
In 1939 Arthur Rothstein made an extensive photo survey of Colorado.
He traveled from the bustling stockyards of Denver to remote farms and ranches west of the Continental Divide.
In Montrose, he photographed this typical small-town scene.
In big cities newspaper distributors had under-paid homeless or desperate children for decades, but in small towns the practice was typically less exploitive.
An enterprising “newsie” could earn pocket change by hawking papers for a few hours each day.
Montrose, a prosperous town on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, happened to be the hometown of Roy Stryker, the visionary director of Rothstein’s Photo Unit at the U.S. Farm Security Administration.
Thomas W. Beede, Resettlement Administration client, gives his youngest daughter a ride, Western Slope Farms, near Delta, Colorado, 1939. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy of Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.
Federal assistance programs under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal provided employment or assistance to tens of thousands in Colorado during the Great Depression.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) alone built more than 5,000 projects in the state including 63 schools, 28 dams, 26 sewage plants, and 21 airports.
FDR’s New Deal Resettlement Administration (known as the RA, later part of the Farm Security Administration or FSA) purchased failed farms and ranches in eastern areas of the state
to create the Pawnee and Comanche National Grasslands.
Hundreds of farmers like Thomas Beede benefited from loans, technical support, or even relocation from submarginal to productive land.
The RA and FSA created a network of county offices to administer loans and provide technical assistance.
FSA loans could buy land, equipment, seed, and livestock.
The agencies also developed cooperative associations and support projects like Western Slope Farms that offered shared access to farm equipment, community and storage facilities, and even pre-paid health care.
This Arthur Rothstein exhibit is made possible by the Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.