The Brooklyn Rail

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.

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.

Rothstein was one of the first photographers employed by the FSA, preceded by Ben Shahn and Walker Evans. As he recalled, all of them were energized by “a missionary sense of dedication … of making the world a better place to live in.” For Rothstein, this utopian promise of documentary photography was to be fulfilled by the medium’s capacity for “visual communication” and for honesty; that is, to explain and to show through images, convincingly. Unlike Evans, who believed in the power of the “pure record” and worked with a certain detachment from his subject, Rothstein immersed himself in the communities he was photographing and synthesized what he learned about their situation in his images. Honesty therefore measures how effectively a photograph communicates to the viewer the photographer’s understanding of reality. “Documentary” describes a stylistic choice, a social and moral commitment. Truthfulness is superior to truth.

Rothstein’s rhetorical approach to photography is evident throughout this exhibition: every photograph contains a story, and every detail in the image contributes to the visual narration. The first section (“Environmental Crisis”) presents views of the social, natural, and built environments in the states most impacted by economic collapse and environmental disaster: a boarded-up bank building, an outhouse half-buried in sand, an idle barn and farm truck, a steer skull propped against cracked earth. These scenes appear to come from an empty stage set or the remains of a bygone civilization, drawing attention to human lives as an absent presence. Section three, “Determined To Stay,” opens with a photograph set in the barren landscape of Grassy Butte, North Dakota, showing a family of farmers getting out of their car in front of a ramshackle Methodist church. The title clarifies the story: Going to Church to Pray for Rain (1936). In the last section, “Power for the People,” we see four women and a young girl engrossed in a stack of large papers, the blueprints of the Rural Electrification, a life-changing program that would bring electric power to large swaths of the agrarian and rustic parts of the United States. Rothstein’s photographs, while looking onto the present, also gesture towards the past and future, containing both cause and effect in its narrative frame.

Yet the communicative desire in Rothstein’s photographs does not render their meaning unambiguous and unchanging. After all, the FSA photographers never developed their own negatives; rather, their film was sent back to D.C. to be selected and developed under Stryker’s supervision, then deposited for free, public use. Ephemera included in this exhibition suggest the ways in which FSA photographs were used and circulated. In one display cabinet, an FDR re-election flyer produced by the Democratic National Committee—“Reclaiming Our Heritage: What the New Deal Has Done to Stop the Waste and Repair the Loss of Our Natural Resources”—features six photographs arranged in two columns, each labeled “before” and “after” by the captions beneath, demonstrating the progress of three FSA programs. Also included is the 1964 reissue of Woody Guthrie’s album Dust Bowl Ballads (1940), featuring Rothstein’s Fleeing A Dust Storm (1936) on the cover, where it powerfully evokes the mood of the era.

Perhaps conscious of the dispersed and open-ended nature of visual meaning, Rothstein frequently made use of text within his frames to clarify his intentions. Billboards, posters, advertisements, shopfronts, and signage proliferate. In a scene taken on a New York street corner, an idle shoe shiner sits with arms crossed before a plaque bearing the maxim, “the secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity.” The picture’s tone is ambiguous, not without irony.

The photojournalistic practice of combining images and text for narrative ends is mirrored in the curatorial approach, which makes extensive use of labels and contextual materials to illustrate the history of the New Deal and the FSA—though with little critical commentary. While the educational intent is commendable and well-suited to the gallery’s setting on a college campus, the relevance of some materials may strike the viewer as unclear, at times distracting from the photographs and undermining their expressive autonomy. As Rothstein once recalled, unlike in magazines—where the photograph was a means to an end (the printed page)—at the FSA, “the picture was the end.” It should be allowed to speak for itself.