[African American Family at Gee's Bend, Alabama]

Arthur Rothstein

1937 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

As one of the first three photographers hired by Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, Rothstein became intimately familiar with the plight of rural families during the Depression. In this photograph, he deftly communicates the individual personalities of each family member despite the formality of the group pose. The image was reproduced in Richard Wright's photo-text book, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941), in which the acclaimed author of Native Son and Black Boy combined New Deal photographs with his words to trace African-American history from slavery, through emancipation, sharecropping, and northern migration, to contemporary joblessness and racial prejudice.

Artist

Arthur Rothstein

Date

1937

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2001