“KILLED”

sequence of digital files, black and white, silent, 2 minutes looped, 2009

 
DESCRIPTION 

    During the Great Depression, the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration, later called the Farm Security Administration, documented American society in photographs.  The director of this program, Roy Emerson Stryker, devised scripts for the photographers of the Historical Section to follow.  He also edited pictures taken in the field after they were sent to Washington, D. C. for processing.  Not a photographer himself, but a social scientist and educator, Stryker had the ultimate say over which of the 145,000 negatives exposed by FSA photographers were worthy of printing and publication.  Nearly half of the pictures made under the program’s auspices from 1935 to 1943 – perhaps 68,000 negatives in total – were rejected, or in Stryker’s term, killed.
    Roy Stryker and his assistants routinely killed 35mm negatives by punching holes in them, thereby rendering them unusable forever.  Photographers working under Stryker strenuously objected to an editorial practice that they regarded as dictatorial and capricious.  Stryker finally stopped destroying his subordinates’ work in early 1939.  After that date, all killed negatives were preserved and filed away, but they remained unprinted, and until recently, unseen.  When the Library of Congress began making high resolution digital scans of FSA negatives available on its website, it included many rejected images, and among them, a small number of killed negatives mutilated by a hole punch.

This work makes use of digitized negatives by the following photographers:

Walker Evans (1903-1975)
Theodor Jung (1906-1986)
Carl Mydans (1907-2004)
Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990)
Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985)
Ben Shahn (1898-1969)
John Vachon (1914-1975).

All images are courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.