Boykin, Alabama 1937

Ten-year-old Artelia Bendolph looks out the window of her grandfather Patrick’s cabin. The window frame is covered with curling newsprint, makeshift insulation. Artelia squints, her head turns away from the sun’s harsh exposure. Against the texture of the cabin’s mud-packed logs, the wood’s cragginess punctuated by lacy tufts of hanging moss and grasses, you can make out images within the newsprint’s advertisements. A woman happily breaks a loaf of still-fresh bread, while she gives thanks to the cellophane that wrapped the loaf, and a couple laughs with joy for being able to start their day with bowls of Shredded Wheat.

Boykin, also known as Gee’s Bend, is a predominantly Black community now known for its mighty contribution to American visual history and culture: the quilts and quilters of Gee’s Bend. However, in 1937, the small town was primarily composed of sharecropper families who had fallen upon desperate times. While images of the Dust Bowl—western skies, the “Grapes of Wrath,” arid plains and dust storms—tend to dominate popular imaginings of 1930s America, in truth the entire country was impacted by the period’s ecological crises. Various regions were hit by drought, famine and flooding, in addition to the dust storms that ran roughshod over the western plains. The parallel collapse of America’s financial and banking institutions amplified the impact of these ecological disasters. Unprecedented unemployment (at the peak of the Great Depression unemployment rates were around twenty percent) and the lack of a meaningful social safety net, coupled with the possibility of your home and livelihood being washed away or dying before your eyes, totally upended American life.

The convergence of America’s financial collapse and the ecological disasters of the Great Depression are eerily reminiscent of our current moment. From the country’s crumbling infrastructure and unsafe working conditions, to the perilous lives of asylum seekers, and the violent storms caused by global warming, there is much we can and should learn from the period’s repair and renewal of the country’s social safety net. While such efforts were implemented through the national rollout of President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, a key piece of the New Deal was how it accounted for, recorded and circulated information on the conditions that necessitated its existence. With no television, and radio inaccessible to many at the time, the American government accomplished this mass education, this truth-telling, through photography.

The photographic unit in the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA) began as a way to justify the Resettlement Administration’s existence. The RA was charged with building camps for displaced migrant workers and farmers in California and needed a way to record and publicize the poverty that was striking the nation. RA photographers traveled around the country and took images of the devastation they witnessed. Their images were then circulated in newspapers and put in the hands of countless Americans. In 1937, the photo unit was moved to the Farm Security Association and henceforth referred to as the FSA photographic unit. In this same year Arthur Rothstein, a then twenty-two-year-old photographer, was sent to Boykin, Alabama, where he met and photographed a ten-year-old Artelia Bendolph.

Arthur Rothstein is the man of the hour at Gage Gallery’s “New Deal America” exhibition, a study of the photographer’s illustrious career, sponsored by the Center for New Deal Studies at Roosevelt University and the university’s college of humanities, education and social sciences. Gage Gallery, known for its photojournalism exhibitions, is one of the rare spaces in the country that shows documentary photography solely for educational purposes. Gage’s mission coincides nicely with Rothstein’s work, as the photographer was a staunch proponent of the medium’s potential to move its viewers to act in the face of injustice.

While Rothstein began as a young artist with the photo unit, his career lasted over five decades and he was the director of photography at both Look and Parade magazines till his death in the 1980s. However, it is these early photographs, taken during the height of the Great Depression, that form the basis of “New Deal America.” The images are chronologically organized and show both how everyday Americans—from migrant workers to Dakota farmers and New York shoeshiners—were impacted by the crises of the time, and how the country began to recover under the initiatives of the New Deal. From images of families evacuating their homes due to flooding and drought, to unhoused and itinerant workers desperate for relief,  to FDR himself traveling the nation to meet Americans impacted by the Great Depression, to communities coming together through the infrastructural plans initiated with New Deal legislation, the exhibition tells the story of a not too far off America.

The photographs themselves are, frankly astounding, given that many in the show were taken before Rothstein’s twentieth birthday and show an extraordinary amount of empathy for the plight of people the photographer only just met. I’m being effusive in my description because the images warrant effusion; each image’s composition, framing, and point of view work in concert to bring forth a compelling and utterly human story. You’re reminded, you cannot forget, that the people within these photographs existed: they struggled, they survived, they lived. They were here.

The title I chose for this piece is a play on a song from Woody Guthrie’s 1940 album, “Dust Bowl Ballads.” The song’s lyrics articulate the sense of shared, monumental loss many Americans faced during the Great Depression. Many people didn’t “have a home in this world anymore.” Yet, through the collective efforts of artists like Rothstein, in a system that not only valued their work but provided a structure in which art could help catalyze material change, a lost home no longer seemed so out of reach. Take this then as a lesson of Rothstein’s work: art can move, art can tell the truth, art can change you. We’d do well then to heed the lessons of “New Deal,” it’s a prescient reminder of what art can accomplish when supported by a system that cares for the people under its wings.

“New Deal America: Photographs by Arthur Rothstein” is on view at Gage Gallery of Roosevelt University, 425 South Wabash, through May 31.