Sharecropper’s daughter, Wilmington, North Carolina

At the age of twenty, Rothstein became the first photographer assigned by the Farm Securities Administration (FSA) to demonstrate, through a sweeping photographic mission that would last over a decade, the need for and success of antipoverty New Deal policies. Other photographers employed by the FSA included Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Marion Post Wolcott. Some of the pictures they created became iconic: just the titles “Migrant Mother” and “Allie Mae Burroughs” might evoke specific faces. Rothstein’s picture of a child looking through the window of her North Carolina home as though through prison bars, her mother and a baby sibling just visible in the interior gloom, did not circulate widely. This is the only print of this image presently known. Yet for Rothstein the image was evidently important: unusually, he elected to create it as a fine print, carefully enlarging and printing it. It was at one time in the collection of Jack Delano, a fellow FSA photographer. (“Celebrating Reunion at the Johnson,” text by Kate Addleman-Frankel and presented at the Johnson Museum May 25-July 28, 2019)