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Ground: Killed Negatives from the Farm Security Administration

Bill McDowell

Friday, November 08 - 4:50PM to 5:35PM

The photographs in Ground were made from 1935-1939 for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal agency found within the Department of Agriculture.
According to the Library of Congress, where the collection now resides, the FSA "project initially documented cash loans made to individual farmers by the Resettlement Administration and the construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states."

The FSA photography division was run by Roy Stryker, who hired photographers, compiled shooting scripts, and selected images to be made available for newspapers, magazines, brochures, books, and governmental publications. In the early years of the program Mr. Stryker periodically used a hole punch to damage negatives (referred to by the FSA as "killed") to prevent them from being published. Many of these negatives remain in the FSA collection.

Roy Stryker, in his hole punching of the negative, wrested the image from its maker and unwittingly created a new picture. One that belonged neither to the mission of the photographer or the FSA. And one with great potential for abstraction.

My selection of killed negatives is highly specific and does not represent the scope of the FSA photographic record. It is non-comprehensive in the photographers chosen, the breadth of their subject matter, and the geographic locations in which they worked.

These photographs have held my attention because of the primacy of the black hole, and the manner in which it excises and coheres. The hole makes a mark so dominant that it conjoins disparate images, a mark that has evolved in relevance and meaning over time to adopt a contemporary bearing.

To me the photographs in "Ground" have a dual temporality, with the black hole suggesting a recent intervention and the background harkening the past. In concert with the subject matter depicted in the photographs, the hole poetically draws parallels between our current (post-Great Recession) environmental, economic, and agricultural challenges and those of post-Great Depression America.

These photographs speak to now and to then as they confer on government intervention, race and class, damaged and bountiful land, drought, flood, exodus. Starting over. Repeating the past.

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