Go West | Arthur Rothstein
“. . . As so often before, another traveler was about to discover America.” Wright Morris
Telluride, Colorado, particularly, is picturesque. Everywhere you turn, at every angel, is a snapshot. It’s worth keeping your gloves pocketed allowing your free hands to gage and control your camera, if only an iPhone. In attempt to capture the light that elegantly dances across the cinnamon colored San Juan mountain scape or the historical Victorian buildings erected in its steady paced village, I was camera ready to create my own visual story of parts unknown. It was my first — and hopefully not my only — adventurous trek through the San Juans.
If the snow is falling, the quiet respite is to be noted and indulged. If the fall Aspen leaves are in full transition of bright yellow, the colors will knock you off your feet. No matter the temperature or weather conditions, Telluride is a magical spot on the globe, offering a non-pretentious feel in a cosmopolitan hub of good food, yoga and art.
While traveling Colorado, I could not help but think of historical FSA (Farm Security Administration) photographers who traveled from New York and Washington, DC boroughs (1940’s) across the midwest towards great mountain scapes. Sedan trunks packed with a suitcase, cameras and dreams. The photographs that resurged from my hard-drive of vast imagery are those pictures of the West by Arthur Rothstein — they have always seemed so patient, interactive and unstaged. Simply a sincere visual journey of his America, our America.
Rebekah Jacob in Telluride, Colorado
In March 1940, Arthur Rothstein (a personal favorite photographer of mine) in the employ of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), was slowly working his way westward across the United States from Washington D.C. His assignment was to document the conditions of California’s migratory labor camps similar to those the public was reading about in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, published a year earlier. This was to be one of his last assignments for the New Deal agency. He made key stops along the way : Colorado, Utah, Nebraska, and Wyoming.
In April he would leave the Historical Section of the FSA to join the nascent staff of Look magazine, then only two years old. As he worked his way through Nebraska, Colorado, and into Wyoming on Route 287 , he photo documented everything that would be of interest to his agency and to anyone seeing this part of the country for the first time. His assignment continued into Utah traveling on U.S. 30. His Utah portfolio expanded to 25 photographs.
It was nothing new for a photographer to discover the West through a camera. Well known photographers like Edward Weston has certainly done it before. But in examining Rothstein’s photographs it is possible to see his work is perhaps more attentive and even sentimental. It is also possible to conclude that his journey across the West was not only brief but strategic and a visual journey of a country he loved.
The visual details of his life on the road have become some of my most treasured inventory and one can easily trace the photographer’s route across the West. Rothstein pioneered the land and medium with a zest and insatiable curiosity that could only inspire.
