images | text

William E. Jones
Born in 1962 in Canton, USA  / Lives in Los Angeles, USA

Jens Hoffmann (JH): How did you become aware of the “killed” negatives of the Farm Security Administration?

William E. Jones (WEJ): I began finding them more or less by accident, since I had originally been searching the FSA collection with another project in mind. After having seen many eroticized images of men in the art and architecture of the New Deal, I wondered if I could find something similar in the documentary photographs of the period. Bits of evidence—glances, gestures, attitudes—that would reveal an erotic leaning. A historical queer presence must have been documented, if only unconsciously or accidentally, by the photographers of the FSA.

JH: Did you indeed find a queer presence?

WEJ: I found very few photographs with the erotic subtext I sought, but I found a great number of negatives with holes in them. I had been aware of the existence of “killed” images because they are mentioned briefly in the critical and historical literature about the FSA. I just didn’t know I would find so many. There are literally thousands on the Library of Congress website. Only a fraction of them—perhaps 200 or so—have been scanned at higher resolution, but more are added every few months.

JH: I was stunned when I realized how many photographs came out of the FSA program. I went to the Library of Congress a few months ago to look at the archive for a show I am doing later in 2011 and was overwhelmed. It was one of the most ambitious and far-reaching artistic projects of the 20th century.

WEJ: Since the FSA never ordered the “killed” negatives printed, they were not included in the vast collection of photographic prints constituting the main part of the collection that was publicly accessible during the 20th century. Except for a few that were reproduced as examples, the vast majority of the “killed” negatives were unknown until the Library of Congress launched its website.

JH: Tell me more about the meaning of the word “killed” in this context.

WEJ: The slang term “killed,” as in to kill a story and prevent its publication, comes from modern journalism. Roy Stryker, the director of the FSA, was a social scientist, not a photographer, and he surely would have become familiar with the term while a student at Columbia University. From his use of the word “killed” to describe unprinted (hence unreproducible) photographs, we can conclude that he saw the agency as performing not a purely artistic function, but a photojournalistic one. He had the good sense and aesthetic discernment to hire wonderful photographers for his project, but he thought of them as producers of images for a giant stock photography archive. What did not serve the needs of the archive could be destroyed—although, significantly, these rejected images were not thrown out, but retained and preserved in their mutilated state.