Fifty remarkable photos and he wasn't even thirty

The nine books in this excellent photo series.

This Arthur Rothstein book is one of nine the LoC have published featuring the main photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. The fifty photos cover the years between 1936 and 1942 when Rothstein traveled around the country initially to photograph rural poverty and later when the FSA  merged into the OWI to shoot general interest scenes showing how the country was overcoming the Depression years. 

Rothstein had a clear eye for an interesting photo whether it was a girl looking out of a shack window showing earth filling up the spaces between the roughly cut logs, taken in Alabama, April 1937, or the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike tunnel from 1942. Amazingly all the photos in the book were taken before he was thirty. His two most famous photos are included, the bleached skull of a steer taken in the South Dakota Badlands in 1936 and a farmer and his two sons walking past a shack during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma in 1936.

This nine-book photographer series, with 450 photos, is an excellent introduction to the Library of Congress collection of documentary images revealing the USA decades ago.