Arthur Rothstein Oregon 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.
This homesteader is clearing the land, Siltcoos, Oregon, 1936. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy of Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.
This farmer was hard at work chopping down trees and removing skunk cabbage and ferns as he attempted to clear an abandoned homestead.
A year earlier, a fine stand of spruce and fir covered this cutover hillside.
This was before freelance loggers cleaned it off, leaving only charred stumps and debris.
A Warm Springs Indian chief at the Molalla Buckaroo, Molalla, Oregon, 1936. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy of Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.
He is from the Land of the Warm Springs, where the Wasco, Paiute and Warm Springs Native American Tribes resided.
They are the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and historically lived along the Columbia River tributaries, an area that stretches from the snowcapped summit of the Cascade Mountains to the palisaded cliffs of the Deschutes River in Central Oregon and spoke Sahaptin.
They moved between winter and summer villages and ate game, roots, berries and salmon.
The Molalla Buckeroo, an annual rodeo event in Molalla, Oregon, has no direct connection to Native Americans, though the town and the event are named after the Molala people, a Native American tribe that historically inhabited the Cascade Range region in Oregon.
The Warm Springs and Molalla tribes are distinct indigenous people with different histories.
While the Molalla people were once a distinct group, they largely relocated and intermarried with other tribes, particularly after being moved to temporary and later federal reservations.
The Molalla Buckaroo is a rodeo started in 1913, primarily as a fundraiser for the local fire department.
This Arthur Rothstein exhibit is made possible by the Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.