Arthur Rothstein
Some FSA photographers entered worksites and shot images of the shop floor. Oddly, the vast majority of these photographs seem posed, and human labor emerges as statue-like and unnatural. To be fair several of these visual artists set out to document a fuller record of workers’ lives, capturing their families, homes, and recreational activities. Arthur Rothstein’s Pittsburgh steel portraits, for instance, need to be placed and understood in this larger creative context– even if the workplace photographs are less than successful (see Figure 10).
[It is interesting to note that far more successful, artistically, are the head shot portraits of rolling mill workers Rotstein created on the same trip; see the final two images below left.]
