Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma

In a 1977 interview, Rothstein recalled, “I lived in the Dust Bowl for several months and went out every day and took pictures. One day, wandering around through Cimarron County in Oklahoma…I photographed a farm and the people who lived there. The farmer and his two children, two little boys, were walking past a shed on their property, and I took a photograph with the dust swirling all around them…It was a picture that had a very simple kind of composition, but there was something about the swirling dust and the shed behind the farmer. What it did was the kind of thing Roy [Stryker] always talked about—it showed an individual in relation to his environment.”