Edwin rosskam biography

Edwin Rosskam was.
Edwin and Louise Rosskam documented American life through photography during the Great Depression.
Edwin Rosskam was born on March 15, 1903 in Munich, Germany.

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Though his name is hardly known today, photographer Edwin Rosskam did at least as much to bring about the state of modern media as Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow. Working behind the camera and the editor’s desk in the early 1940s for the Federal Farm Security Administration and several publishers earned Rosskam little in the way of recognition, though some few photographers, like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, who worked for the FSA did become famous.

Yet Rosskam was instrumental in the development of “our present concept of photo-journalism,” as he explained himself in a 1965 interview. The word itself, Rosskam claimed, was one “I believe I first brought into current use….” It’s not an empty boast. On returning to the US in the 1930s from time spent photographing in French Polynesia, Rosskam discovered the Depression happening, ran out of money, and pitched “the notion,” he says “together with my wife [Louise] to do a picture page once a week with a picture story” for the Philadelphia Record.

Before Life or Look magazines and their score

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Object Details

interviewee: Rosskam, Edwin, 1903-1985
interviewer: Doud, Richard Keith
Subject: Rosskam, Louise, 1910-2003; Lange, Dorothea; Stryker, Roy Emerson; Vachon, John; Wolcott, Marion Post; Wright, Richard; United States. Farm Security Administration. Historical Section; New Deal and the Arts Oral History Project

Place of publication, production, or execution

New Jersey

Physical Description

70 Pages, Transcript

General Note

Originally recorded on 2 sound tape reels. Reformatted in 2010 as 3 digital wav files. Duration is 2 hr., 49 min.

Access Note / Rights

Transcript available on the Archives of American Art website.

Summary

An interview of Edwin and Louise Rosskam conducted 1965 August 3, by Richard Doud, for the Archives of American Art, at their home, in Roosevelt, N.J.

Edwin Rosskam speaks of his background and youth in Germany; coming to the United States; his education in painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the early development of his interest in photography; getting his photojournalism career started; joining the Farm Security

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Edwin Rosskam, Photographer born

Edwin Rosskam with Louisa (wife)

*Edwin Rosskam was born on this date in 1903. He was a white Jewish-American freelance photographer and writer.

Edwin Rosskam was born in Munich, Germany, to American parents and came to Philadelphia, PA, in his late teens in 1919. Rosskam aspired to be an artist and took up painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It was here the early development of his interest in photography began. Getting his photojournalism career started, Rosskam joined the Farm Security Administration and worked under Roy Stryker.

The view of America presented by the work produced by the FSA; photography exhibits he has done; the effect upon him of the people he met and photographed during his FSA career; the political impact of the FSA; applications and uses of the photographs produced by the FSA; the project's strengths and weaknesses; books and other projects he contributed to.

He photographed oil refineries and river scenes for the Standard Oil