Courtesy of the Library of Congress and williamejones.com
Artist William E. Jones is known for his thought-provoking films that make high art out of everything form gay porn to fandom. For his latest project, he tapped the venerated Farm Security Administration photos from the Great Depression. From 1935 to 1944, photographers such as Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks took photos of rural American life. Many famous pictures emerged from the era including Dorthea Lange's "Migrant Mother" and Gordon Parks' "American Gothic."
Overseeing it all was Roy Stryker, head of the Information Division of the FSA. When Stryker saw a picture he didn't like, he'd punch a hole through the negative, making sure it could never be printed. Though many people knew about these "killed" photos, they were never collected until Jones happened across them while searching the Library of Congress' archives. Now, he's put them into two brief films, one, Killed, is currently playing at the Saint Louis Art Museum until April 28, where visitors can also see his book Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration and see other photographs from the FSA.
St. Louis Magazine sat down with the artist when he was in town last week for his exhibit.
How did you get started in photography?
I studied film theory and photography as an undergraduate; I went to Yale. And as it happens, that’s the photography program that was founded by Walker Evans, who's one of the photographers in Killed, and probably the most famous photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration. I’m not old enough to have studied with Walker Evans. He died in 1975, but in a sense his ghost was still hovering over the place when I was there. It was the era of straight documentary photography.
How did you discover the killed photos?
I had an intuition about the Farm Security Administration archive, which proved to be only partly correct. I was familiar with the public art murals that had been made under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration, and many of them are quite homoerotic. They’re these glorified portraits of workers and my question was: Did any of the photographers working for the FSA make work that consciously or unconsciously had this same kind of homoerotic quality? And in this I was mostly disappointed, but not entirely. But in my search I came across all these images with black holes in them. And that ended up becoming the main focus of my research, finding out what these images were; why they had been canceled with a hole; and who took them and when and where. All of these things were questions that I had to investigate. It wasn’t readily available information on the [Library of Congress] website. So I was, in a sense, performing art historical research as a lay person, as an artist.
What did you think was the reason for the holes in the photos?
I very quickly learned that it was the director of the program, Roy Stryker, who had done the killing of the negatives. But the mysterious aspect of it is why he killed some images and not others. Stryker never made public any kind of statement about why he killed images. And this is a practice that really enraged the photographers who worked for the FSA.
For good reason.
The photographers who worked for the FSA, especially Walker Evans but also Dorthea Lange and others, considered themselves to be artists who happened to practice the medium of photography. This was not the general attitude of American culture at the time. Photographs were considered journalism. The were considered documentary recording. They were considered tools for publicity. But they were not really considered art by the majority of Americans and in this sense, Stryker was more or less typical. He didn’t primarily consider the photographs he commissioned to be art. He thought they were tools for publicizing the efforts of the government to improve the American society during the Depression. And it’s a very complicated question: Is this body of work art? Or is it not? Is this body of work propaganda, or is it not? These are questions that continue to interest spectators, scholars and artists to this day. And I’ve brought a new group of insights to that question because I’m focusing on what got suppressed. Before the digitizing of the archive, there was very little access to these killed images. The only access you had was to things that got printed.
There are two films. One called Punctured and one called Killed. Why did you make two films? How do they differ?
It's a slight variation. I wanted to animate a zoom into or out of the black holes, but at the time I made Killed, I lacked the skills to make that kind of animation sufficiently clear. I wanted there to be enough detail in the imagery that you could really see that it was photographic and video can be a little fuzzy. So I made Killed with this very jarring editing strategy, because it was what I could do at the time. But within about a year, I learned how to animate the zooms that I wanted to make in and out of the holes, and so I made Punctured which has a very fluid zoom. But because the zoom takes place in a horizontal frame, I only used 100 images that were horizontally oriented. Killed is the full version; it's 150 images.
In your book Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration, you talk a lot about the different photographers and their reactions.
Every photographer had a different story. Some of them were very sad. There was a photographer by the name of Theodor Jung, and he had most of his negatives killed. Stryker and he did not get along, and they had very different ideas about how he should be documenting his subjects. There were other photographers who didn’t have any of their pictures killed. Russell Lee is the most famous example. He was very observant of Stryker’s rules, and he was, in a sense, Stryker’s favorite. I consider the most interesting story in the book to be the story of John Vachon, who was a file clerk at the Farm Security Administration, and Stryker very generously said to him, “Perhaps you should try your hand at photography, and not just stick to being a file clerk.” So Vachon started to walk the streets of Washington D.C. and take documentary photographs of his surroundings. Now, the majority of these were killed by Stryker; so what you actually get to see is the process by which Vachon learned to become a documentary photographer with Stryker as his instructor.
So, is the exhibit about censorship?
Censorship is sort of an official word, and I’m not sure it’s exactly the right word for what happened. Whenever there’s any kind of official discourse, there’s always something that gets left out. There’s a voice that gets left out. There’s an idea that gets left out. Perhaps I’m a perverse soul but I’m always interested in what gets left out. And I’m interested in why. My hope is that [this] is the beginning of a debate about this body of photographs that I consider to be among the most important bodies of artistic works produced in the United States. It’s a truly important part of America’s cultural patrimony and like all important cultural artifacts, interpretations of it, ideas about it, transform over time.
