Arthur Rothstein: New Deal America at Kingsborough Art Museum

Via The Brooklyn Rail

May 13, 2025

By Farren Fei Yuan

 In 1935, Arthur Rothstein, freshly graduated from Columbia University, was recruited by his former professor in economics, Roy Stryker, to join the photography unit of the Historical Section, later part of the Farmer Security Administration (FSA) under the New Deal. The Historical Section’s role was to document—and create a history for—the FSA’s work. Faced with the prolonged economic depression, Rothstein quickly took up the offer, not knowing that he would soon author some of the most reproduced images of his time.

This is where New Deal America: Photographs by Arthur Rothstein, on view at Kingsborough Art Museum, begins. Bookended by one of Rothstein’s earliest and most famous “Dust Bowl” pictures (Heavy Black Clouds of Dust Rising over the Texas Panhandle, Texas [1936]) and a deceptively serene scene taken as the U.S. fully entered World War II (Saturday Afternoon in a Prosperous TVA town [1942]), the exhibition surveys what is arguably the most successful period in Rothstein’s career—travelling across the United States on assignment, he photographed rural and suburban communities affected by the Great Depression and the FSA’s efforts toward rehabilitation and resettlement.

Arthur Rothstein, Heavy Black Clouds of Dust Rising over the Texas Panhandle, 1936

The forty-two black-and-white photographs on view have been selected from the Library of Congress collection by the curators, Dr. Ann Rothstein Segan, who is Rothstein’s daughter, and her partner, Brodie Hefner. Presented in chronological sections, the display illustrates a “narrative of recovery and renewal,” as the gallery director Dr. Brian E. Hack writes, one that provokes timely reflection on the role and nature of the federal government. Yet what remains unsaid, though implicit, in the emphatic accumulation of photographic encounters—cemented by the occasional meeting of gazes between the photographer, his subjects, and the viewer—are the questions the exhibition raises about different conceptions of the documentary and the social responsibility of art.    Click for full article

Sunday To-Do: Dorothea Lange doc Grab a Hunk of Lightning in Santa Fe

Unforgettable … You don’t want to miss it.” –Ms. Magazine

Most famous for her celebrated photograph Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange's enduring images document five turbulent decades of American history, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II Japanese American internment camps. Lange’s granddaughter, the longtime Santa Fean and five-time Emmy Award-winning cinematographer Dyanna Taylor, directs and narrates this intimate documentary that combines family memories and journals with never-before-seen photos and film footage. An onstage interview with Dyanna Taylor and Elizabeth Partridge, Lange’s biographer, and Imogen Cunningham's granddaughter, follows the screening. (U.S., 2014, 120m)


2:00p Sunday, February 1 - $50 to benefit the CCA, includes pie-and-coffee reception!


Click Here to buy tickets!

"If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing."

 

Roger Fenton /Smithsonian/AP
Some believe photographer Roger Fenton placed the cannonballs on the Ukrainian road during the Crimean War himself


Errol Morris Looks For Truth Outside Photographs
 September 17, 2011
Via NPR

Believing Is Seeing

Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

by Errol Morris

Hardcover, 310 pages | purchase

Errol Morris is regarded as one of the world's most important filmmakers and is best known for his documentaries The Thin Blue Line and the Oscar-award winning Fog of War.

But before he was a filmmaker, he was a detective and he's always been interested in uncovering the mysteries of photographs. In his new book, Believing Is Seeing, Morris focuses on the things you can't see in photographs and the importance of what lies outside the frame.

Morris tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz that his obsession with photos began when he was a small boy and his father died.

"I was only 2 years old [and] don't have any memory of him at all. But there were photographs of him all over the house," he says. "I remember looking at these photographs; this is someone that I should know, probably should remember, but there's this mystery."

Photo Manipulation

Trying to recover the context of photographs is a theme in Morris' book. In one example, he takes his critical eye to two photos of the Crimean War taken by Roger Fenton in the 1850s. Both images are shot from the same spot, but one shows markedly more cannonballs on the road than the other. Photography scholars have long considered the photo with more cannonballs as the first instance of a photo manipulation. They say it was done by Fenton to drum up drama about the war for his British readership.

But Morris disagrees. He says no one can be sure if Fenton added or removed the cannonballs from the frame.

"I walked away thinking I really don't know. We all know that staging is that big no-no in photography. I would call it a fantasy that we can create some photographic truth by not moving anything, not touching anything, not interacting with the scene that we're photographing in any way," he says. "If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing."

Staged Dust Bowl

Morris says photographers have been posing photos as long as they've been taking them. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt sent out photographers to capture what life was like during the Dust Bowl. An iconic image taken by Arthur Rothstein of a cow skull on a barren landscape was meant to show the drama of the drought.

"Then they found out he had taken multiple photographs of the cow skull and clearly it had been moved," he says. "Well, people who were opposed to the Roosevelt administration seized on this. They became outraged, they felt manipulated, deceived; [there were] allegations that Rothstein had actually brought the cow skull with him from Washington."

Even though there actually was a drought, Morris says, critics were quickly caught up in the deception.

 

 

Arthur Rothstein/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection

Overgrazed Land. Pennington County, South Dakota (1936) is one of several photographs Arthur Rothstein took to document dry, sun-baked earth of the South Dakota Badlands.

"Was he trying to deceive the public? Was he trying to use the photograph for propaganda? If not him, was it the newspaper editors who placed it in their newspapers?" he says. "And it goes into that whole question of what is propaganda. Can any photograph be used for the purposes of propaganda?"

Parallels Between Filmmaking, Photography

Morris says when he first started making films, he was accused of making documentaries the wrong way.

"People would say, 'You're not supposed to use Philip Glass music, you're not supposed to use reenactments.' And my answer then — and it's still my answer over the years — is that style is not what guarantees truth," he says.

Morris says there's no such thing as a true or false photograph, and that doesn't really matter anyway. He says the most important thing is to ask any documentarian — in film, photography or print — to pursue the truth.

Read an excerpt of Believing Is Seeing