Kelly Sidley
Head of Department
Lot 27
Arthur Rothstein(1915-1985)Family, Gee's Bend, Alabama
6 April 2023, 13:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$1,250 inc. premium
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Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985)
Family, Gee's Bend, Alabama, 1937
Ferrotyped gelatin silver print; the photographer's hand stamp on the verso.
6 x 8 ½ in. (15.2 x 21.6 cm.)
Ferrotyped gelatin silver print; the photographer's hand stamp on the verso.
6 x 8 ½ in. (15.2 x 21.6 cm.)
Footnotes
Provenance
Witkin Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Literature:
'The Depression Years as Photographed by Arthur Rothstein' (New York, Dover Publications, 1978), p. 14
'The Photographs of Arthur Rothstein' (Washington, D.C., The Library of Congress, 2011), plate 4
Note
Rothstein worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression to document rural communities across the country. This family portrait of 16 men, women, and children of all ages was reproduced in Richard Wright's 1941 photo-text book '12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States'. The entire family were descendants of former slaves of the Pettway Plantation, where they still lived and worked as sharecroppers at the time that Rothstein took this photograph in 1937.