The Weird and Wonderful Black Hole Photographs

The Weird and Wonderful Black Hole Photographs - Printable Version

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The Weird and Wonderful Black Hole Photographs - EndtheMadnessNow - 02-11-2024

No, not those black holes... Censored Images From America’s Great Depression.

US Farm Security Administration's (FSA) ambitious project to document the lives of farming families & relocation of families during the 1930s across the USA.

Roy Emerson Stryker of the Farm Security Administration commissioned a small army of photojournalists to travel America portraying the poor, their shattered homes, and a bereft American landscape. The unforgettable results include Walker Evans’s famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.

This small but outstanding exhibition reveals the brutal cropping of history behind those iconic images. Only a minority of photographs satisfied the FSA. Stryker did not simply put the rejects in a filing cabinet. He and his staff punched holes in the negatives so they could not be printed without the defacing presence of a big black hole. They literally "killed" the unwanted pictures.

But they’re neither objects nor stains, rather punch holes made by Roy Stryker, director of the FSA’s documentary photograph program, and his team of editors. The holes marked pictures as unfit for purpose. But what was the purpose of the Government program if not to show it all?

The holes have become additions, extra points of interest.

Why were these images killed? What is it about each image we see here that caused the editors to act as censors? Looking at the holes in the sky, we might put on our tinfoil hats and look for conspiracy, supposing the images have been redacted to remove traces of flying objects. What is the man picking up from the grass? Why is another man’s face obliterated? Who is the missing face in the crowd?

At the final count, around 100,000 images by photographers like Gordon Parks, Russell Lee and Marion Post Wolcott had been ‘killed’.

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In 1939, Stryker finally put aside his practice of punching holes in negatives, allowing the "bad" shots to live on unscathed.

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New York photographer Bill McDowell published a book of a selection of FSA negatives, along with his recreation of the photo without the black spot. The 2016 book called "Ground: A Reprise of Photographs from the Farm Security Administration".

McDowell's site explains the black spots: "The FSA photography division was run by Roy Stryker, who routinely defaced FSA negatives with a hole punch to prevent them from being printed, much to the consternation of the photographers." McDowell wants to make the original vision of photographers whole again. "Each photograph in 'Ground' is the result of three separate acts of picture-making: the original photographer's deliberate compositional and contextual choices, Stryker's hole punch, and my re-contextualization," he said.

Today we can see them all (most of them) at the National Archives. But back then the desire to show the places and faces of America in the mire was controlled to fit a message.

Here's a few photos of what the censors didn’t want you to see: the black hole photographs. These pictures each contain an inky black disc of nothing. A black sun hangs with pendant menace and mystery.

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Quote:Another FSA staffer, Ben Shahn, referred to Stryker’s style as “a little bit dictatorial”:

He ruined quite a number of my pictures. . . . Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time. . . . Later on, during the war . . . I went to look for [a] negative and he[‘d] punched a hole through it. Well, I shot my mouth off about that. But, I didn't know what was done with a lot of my negatives, naturally. He learned, then, not to do that, you see, because this was an invaluable document of what life was like in 1935 and when I was looking for it in 1943 or '44 it didn't exist anymore.

The Kept and the Killed Essay by Erica X Eisen for The Public Domain Review.

RE: The Weird and Wonderful Black Hole Photographs - EndtheMadnessNow - 02-11-2024

More...

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Sources::

Library of Congress Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives (Click on "Hole punch")

The Kept and the Killed Essay by Erica X Eisen for The Public Domain Review.

Killed Negatives review – uncovering the dark heart of the Depression

Many Great Depression Photos Were ‘Killed’ by This Editor’s Hole Punch