Dust Bowl

Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936, by Arthur Rothstein. A farmer and his two sons lean into a dust storm on their way to a shack half buried by drifting soil, the fence posts around them sunk almost to their tops. The archive's own title is plain, "Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm," and the picture hardly needs more. It shows not the storm arriving but a family living inside it, in the Oklahoma Panhandle at the heart of the Dust Bowl.