?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
(PHOTOGRAPHY.) ROTHSTEIN, ARTHUR & MARION POST. Pair of gelatin silver print photographs of tenant farmers in the rural South. 8 x 10 glossies, with stamps from the Farm Security Administration on the reverse. Vp, 1930's
Some of the most touching photography to come out of the rural south was shot during the Great Depression, by WPA photographers. "In 1937, Arthur Rothstein was in north-central Alabama photographing Birmingham's steel industry and some nearby resettlement housing projects when he received new instructions from his boss, 'The other day, while getting out a set of pictures for the Administrator to take to Congress,' Stryker wrote on February 5, 'I realized how lean our file is on good southern tenancy pictures. [We must] find families that are fairly representative of the conditions in the tenancy areas, then take quite a series of pictures on each of these families, showing the house, the people, the children, the farm, the buildings and fences, etc.'"--from the Library of Congress website. Provenance: estate of Richard Wright, who had them from his collaboration with Edwin Rosskam on the book 12 Million Black Voices.
