Born 1903, Munich, Germany
Died 1985


Rosskam was born in Germany to American parents. In 1919, after World War I and while still a teenager, he immigrated to the United States, where he completed one year at Haverford College and studied painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His paintings were exhibited there, as well as in the Carnegie International and in solo exhibitions in Paris. In the 1920s he lived in Paris, among other American expatriate artists and writers. There, the Museum of Anthropology, in connection with the European Press Syndicates, sponsored him on a three-and-a-half-year assignment in French Polynesia, where he wrote and photographed. In the late 1930s he worked for Life and Look magazines in Puerto Rico. His novel The Alien is based on his experiences there. In 1938 Rosskam worked for Roy Stryker as a visual-aid specialist, doing layout design for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and making photographs for Stryker's Standard Oil project. Mining the FSA files for photographs made during the Depression, he provided meticulous art direction for Richard Wright's book 12 Million Black Voices (1941). Rosskam and his wife and fellow photographer Louise joined the Photo League in the fall of 1947, along with twenty others, including John Vachon and Jack Delano, who were also contributors to the FSA. In 1948 the Rosskams published Towboat River, a book about the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, illustrated with their photographs.