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This recent release piques my interest:
Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration prints 130 tri-toned black-and-white images scanned from negatives in the collection of the Library of Congress. Wiliam E. Jones’s book is the first to deal exclusively with the 35mm negatives that FSA director Roy Stryker killed with a hole punch during the early years of the project (1935-39). The book brings to light destroyed or defaced photographs by Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and others; it also includes two essays by Jones discussing the images and possible reasons for their suppression.
You can search through the 175,000 Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives and pick out the punched prints yourself. Here’s some off just the first page.
In July, Foto8 reviewed the Punctured, a 5 minute film by the book’s author William E. Jones:
It was not so long ago that photographers and editors editing film would use a hole punch to indicate a selected frame, clipping a small half circle out of the edge of the frame by the sprocket holes where the frame number and film info had been burned into the emulsion during manufacturing. Stryker was more ruthless with his hole punch, “killing” the work of his photographers by punching a hole directly through the negative image. Unsurprisingly, the photographers objected to this practice, which Stryker ended in 1939. Many of the punched negatives survive in the US Library of Congress FSA archives.
Punctured, Jones explained, is about the “Interface between image making and power… what images authority gives us and what we do with them.” Jones’ effort is to unsettle those relationships and to this end Punctured is articulate in its explorations of the way that archives are constructed, of the FSA archive specifically as the product of Stryker’s judgments …
OTHER PUNCHY CONTRIBUTIONS
This all leaves me thinking of Lisa Oppenheim‘s Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans.
Lisa Oppenheim, from the project Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans
Carefully Aimed Darts points out the Etienne Chambaud also made use of the defaced FSA negs for the show A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
Installation shot, Etienne Chambaud: Personne, 2008
If only for the similarity between precision-cut and precision-painted holes I am left thinking of John Baldessari:
John Baldessari. Hitch-hiker (Splattered Blue) 1995. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York © John Baldessari. Colour photograph, acrylic, maquette
New Orleans. In the collection of the Peter Sekear Estate.
Actually, Jacob Holdt was the new Peter Sekaer … we just never knew about Sekaer. Until now.
Sekaer
The New York Times reported today on Signs of Life at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, a major survey of Peter Sekaer’s life and of his works. Sekaer died prematurely in 1950 at the age of 49, leaving stacks of unsorted photographs.
Curator, Julian Cox said of his work, “We wanted to uncover this hidden gem. Sekaer was like the passage of a meteor, very bright but fairly brief.”
Sekaer often took photographic trips with friend Walker Evans. Sekaer photographed high streets, impoverished neighbourhoods, markets and games. He photographed signs and billboards. From 1936-43 he worked on assignment for various government agencies including the FSA, the USHA and the REA. His task was to document the depressed country and thus Seaker photographed a lot of poor Americans.
Excepting the New Deal agencies, this focus and unexpected coverage was repeated 40 years later by another Dane.
Jacob Holdt‘s ongoing life’s work American Pictures* is equally committed to describing the hardships of the American South. Holdt met many people suffering in a discriminatory culture with discriminatory laws. (I wrote about Holdt following his autobiographical presentation at the 2009 New York Photography Festival.
Holdt (b.1947) is the geist of Sekaer.
It should be noted Holdt doesn’t call himself a photographer, rather a man who uses the camera as a tool in his activism. Sekaer was professional from 1936 onward.
DANISH INQUISITION
It would be foolish to attribute their curiosity and achievements to their Danish heritage, or to suggest that foreign eyes can see with more clarity the shortcomings of their host nation. Sekaer and Holdt likely were/are simply good people with a belief in stories to be told.
Sekaer was an anomaly for his time; an outspoken, moody Dane, with a German camera, asking folk about their lives. Sekaer’s daughter, Christina explains that it wasn’t just his eyes that made his photographs, Sekaer’s voice did too, “His accent helped people want to talk to him.”
Sixty years on, it’s nice to meet you Mr. Sekaer.
More images here.
Peter Sekaer (American, born Denmark, 1901–1950)
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1901, Peter Sekaer immigrated to the United States in 1918 at the age of seventeen. After successfully operating a printing business in New York City producing posters, advertisements and window displays, he enrolled in the Art Students League in 1929 to study painting. He soon became involved in the New York art scene, befriending, among others, the artist Ben Shahn and the photographer Walker Evans.
By 1934 Sekaer had left painting behind to study photography with Berenice Abbott at the New School for Social Research. Through his friendship with Walker Evans he secured contracts from 1936 to 1943 to work on assignment as a photographer for various government agencies that were created as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal program. In 1945 Sekaer started his own commercial photography business, shooting advertisements and human interest stories for magazines.
In 1950, at age forty-nine, Sekaer suffered a fatal heart attack. His life’s work has been preserved by his wife, Elisabeth Sekaer Rothschild, and their younger daughter, Christina Sekaer.
'Family Shelling Pecans, Austin, Texas', 1939. G Peter Sekaer. Collection of the High Art Museum, Atlanta. Purchased with funds from Robert Yellowlees.
Signs of Life: Photographs by Peter Sekaer is the first major exhibition dedicated to the work of the Danish-born American photographer Peter Sekaer. Organized by the High, the exhibition runs June 5, 2010 through January 11, 2011. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree Street, N.E. Atlanta, Georgia 30309.
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Prison Photography 