Arthur Rothstein South Dakota 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.
Modern covered wagon going west for work. Pennington County, South Dakota, 1936. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy of Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.
1936 was a year of sharp contrasts. Elevating political and cultural events were a counterpoint to crushing economic and ecological challenges.
Voters swept President Franklin D. Roosevelt into his second term with a landslide victory in 46 states.
Tragically, thousands of drought-ravaged farms were battered by dust storms and extreme weather.
Many could not endure the frigid winter months followed by the sizzling summer heat wave of 1936.
Scenes like this were common across the Great Plains.
A bleached skull on parched, overgrazed land. Badlands, South Dakota, 1936. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy of Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.
During the 1936 Presidential campaign, a conservative North Dakota newspaper attempted to discredit the New Deal and President Roosevelt by inaccurately labeling this photo as “fake.”
But the photo was real—one of several images that Rothstein had composed by photographing a skull at different angles and positions on a 10-foot patch of ground.
The newspaper correctly noted that the skull had probably been there for years, and such a photo could be taken any year.
True enough, but the images effectively told the story of remote, over-grazed land damaged by a worsening drought.
The paper’s motives were revealed by the timing of its “fake photo” story, which ran on the day President Roosevelt arrived in Fargo to tour stricken local farms and federal drought-relief projects.
Eventually, the truth prevailed. There was a severe drought.
Americans could see the evidence in Rothstein’s photos of the conditions he witnessed, from the Dust Bowl in the southern Great Plains to the struggling farms and ranches in the Dakotas.
This Arthur Rothstein exhibit is made possible by the Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.
