Arthur Rothstein came to the Farm Security Administration by an unusual route: he was Roy Stryker’s student at Columbia before he became one of the project’s photographers. Born in New York in 1915, Rothstein spent five years on the FSA payroll, and the work he made in that period—Virginia farmers, Dust Bowl towns, cattle ranchers in Montana, the tenant community at Gee’s Bend, Alabama—anchors this volume, the sixth in the Library of Congress’s Fields of Vision series, published by GILES in 2011.

The book is compact, and deliberately so: 64 pages in a square format measuring roughly 21.6 centimetres to a side. Fifty photographs are reproduced from the Library of Congress’s holdings of Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information material, and the selection opens with an account of Rothstein’s life and career. The scale suits the material. These are pictures built for circulation through newspapers and magazines, and they hold their ground at book size without being monumentalised.

What distinguishes the series is its method: one photographer, a considered selection, a consistent design across volumes. The result is neither a history of the FSA nor a monograph pretending to completeness, but a working sample that lets a reader follow the temperament of a single eye across varied assignments—the drought-stricken plains, the cattle country, the Alabama settlement where Rothstein made some of his most quoted frames.

His later career bears on how we read him. After the Second World War Rothstein joined Look, serving as the magazine’s director of photography until it ceased production in 1971; he died in 1985. A photographer who spent decades deciding which pictures would be printed carried that judgement back into his own negatives. The FSA work reads as record and as edit at once.

For a collector building a shelf on American documentary photography, this is a sensible entry point rather than an endpoint: a modest, well-proportioned paperback that returns a canonical body of work to its archival context and pairs it with a concise biographical introduction. Other contributors to the volume are credited alongside Rothstein’s photographs.