Ground

The photographs in 'Ground' are taken from an archive of 145,000 images from 1935-1943 for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal agency ... within the Department of Agriculture ... The FSA photography division was run ... by Roy Stryker, who ... routinely damaged FSA negatives with a hole punch to prevent them from being printed. Some of the negatives he punched (referred to by the FSA as 'killed') were poor exposures or had been ruined already by faulty development ... while others had no technical flaws ... It is likely that Roy Stryker's ... only goal was to destroy undesirable negatives. But in his act of censorship Stryker wrested the photograph from its maker and unwittingly created a new picture ... Each photograph in 'Ground' is the result of 3 separate acts of picture-making : the original photographer's deliberate compositional and contextual decisions, Stryker's hole punch, and my re-contextualization ... By narrowing the scope of photographs to that of land and agriculture I've tried to construction an elemental relationship with the 1930s through our common reliance on the soil ... The photographers whose work is represented in this book are Paul Carter, Walker Evans, Theodor Jung, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and Marion Paul Wolcott.