Questa pagina pubblicata da Public Domain Review racconta del progetto fotografico della Farm Security Administration (FSA), parla del New Deal di Franklin D. Roosevelt, focalizzato sulla documentazione della povertà rurale durante la Grande Depressione.
Le fotografie furono commissionate dalla FSA e nell’ambito del progetto vennero prodotte circa 270.000 immagini; tuttavia, 100.000 di queste furono “killed” (cioè escluse), segnate da un buco al centro del negativo. Il Direttore del progetto fotografico, Roy Stryker, determinava quali immagini fossero accettabili, utilizzando tecniche come il buco sul negativo per escludere quelle non ritenute idonee.
La filosofia editoriale di Stryker causò conflitti con i fotografi, inclusi Dorothea Lange e Ben Shahn, i quali contestarono la sua pratica di eliminare immagini significative.
Stryker’s editorial philosophy occasionally brought him into conflict with the photographers he employed. His refusal to use the captions Lange painstakingly composed for her own images greatly frustrated her (despite praising Migrant Mother as the pinnacle of the FSA photography program’s output, Stryker would fire Lange on three separate occasions).8 Photographer Edwin Rosskam remarked bitterly that Stryker’s hole-punching habit “was barbaric to me. . . I’m sure that some very significant pictures have in that way been killed off, because there is no way of telling, no way, what photograph would come alive when”.9 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.”
Questi negativi esclusi, ora conservati nella Library of Congress, attirano l’attenzione per il loro carattere unico e per il buco che ne diventa punto focale. Il progetto sollevò domande sul valore delle vite rappresentate e sulla discriminazione nel trattamento di diversi gruppi sociali.
Most of the negatives Stryker killed, by all accounts, were redundancies nixed in favor of a similar image with stronger composition, clearer focus, and facial expressions better comporting with the themes of suffering and endurance he sought to draw out of the FSA’s subjects. Shot through, these unloved alternates have become almost more interesting than their perfect twins. In contrast to the carefully captioned File images, killed negatives have no names attached, often no notes on provenance: what little we know about them is only by analogy to those photos that were saved, clues about location gleaned from landscapes, clothing, faces. As such, the killed photos demand a more active viewer, one willing to piece together, to parse, to consign some things to the realm of the curious and unknowable.
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