Dover’s 1981 paperback collects 122 black-and-white photographs that Arthur Rothstein made in the American West during the 1930s. It is not a landscape album. Rothstein points his camera at towns, rented land, roadside commerce, weather, and the faces of people getting by, and the West that emerges is a working region rather than a scenic one.

Rothstein was among the photographers employed on the federal documentary project of the Depression years, the Farm Security Administration file, and that background shapes the book. The cataloguing that accompanies it keeps returning to the same three terms — pictorial works, description and travel, social life and customs — which is a fair summary of what the pictures do: they record how a vast, unevenly settled territory was actually inhabited at a particular moment.

The book is built as plates rather than as an illustrated essay: 121 pages carrying 122 images, issued in Dover’s Pictorial Archive series, the paperback list that made historical photographs widely available for reference and study. Format is part of the argument here. With the sequence doing most of the work and the pictures reproduced plainly in black and white, the reader meets the photographs at close to documentary scale, one after another, instead of as isolated masterpieces.

For a collector, the interest lies less in the object — a modest paperback — than in the gathering. Rothstein’s western negatives of the thirties have mostly been encountered through a large government archive and through other selections; here 122 of them sit in a single, stable order. Readers who know Dover’s companion volume of his Depression-era work will recognise the editorial logic: an inexpensive, unglamorous book that functions as a working file of one photographer’s decade.