Providing a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and Second World War, each Fields of Vision volume includes an introduction to the life of the photographer and 50 evocative images selected from their work. Arthur Rothstein was born in New York in 1915. In the early 1930s he attended Columbia University, where he studied with Roy Stryker, who later hired him at the FSA. During his five years as an FSA photographer, Rothstein produced a gripping visual record of the country's poor that included Virginia farmers, the Dust Bowl, cattle ranchers in Montana, and a tenant community in Gee's Bend, Alabama. After World War II he joined Look magazine, serving as director of photography until the magazine ceased production in 1971. He died in 1985. AUTHOR: George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square; two works of non-fiction, The Village of Waiting and Blood of the Liberals; and a collection of journalism, Interesting Times. His play Betrayed won the 2008 Lucille Lortel Award for best Off-Broadway play. "I found that a kind of individualism existed among the people, an inability to conform, desire to be the master of their own fate?the one thing I found in traveling through the United States was that every man and every woman was different." Arthur Rothstein "Rothstein was happy enough to be a useful agent of New Deal propaganda, but his belief in social progress didn't congeal into a rigid ideology of the lens. Instead, it opened him to the stunning variety of human landscapes in the far corners of the republic." George Packer on Arthur Rothstein ILLUSTRATIONS: 55 photographs
