The Keeper Frame

In the 1930s the Farm Security Administration sent photographers across America. Back in Washington, Roy Stryker's office decided which frames went into the file and "killed" the rest. Some of the killed frames got a hole punched straight through the negative. Today those wounded negatives hang in galleries as the censored pictures of the Depression. This episode puts the legend next to the record: who held the punch, what "killed" actually meant, and why the punching stopped in 1939. It starts with the day Ben Shahn went looking for a photograph of a storefront in Marked Tree, Arkansas, with the prices marked in Bon Ami, and found the negative destroyed.

There is no single famous keeper this time. This one is about the rejects. Most were near-duplicates, and every now and then one held the very thing the photographer needed years later. It's for anyone who has spent a long night deciding which frames live, and it ends with one idea to take into your next cull: choose the keeper, but don't destroy the alternates.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/02/holes-punched-through-history/518115/

https://loc.gov/collections/fsa-owi-black-and-white-negatives/about-this-collection

https://docslib.org/doc/3932144/selecting-photographs-for-the-fsa-owi-print-file-a-photo-assignment-case-study

https://theburiedsouth.com/episodes/070-killed-negatives/

https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12542

https://www.archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/download/13228/14547/15772

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/great-depression-photos

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-ben-shahn-12760

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/footnotes.html

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-edwin-and-louise-rosskam-13112

https://brewminate.com/the-kept-and-the-killed-edited-photographic-documentation-of-the-great-depression/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/06/censored-images-of-1930s-america-to-go-on-show-in-london

https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/killed-negatives-unseen-images-1930s-america/

https://www.williamejones.com/portfolio/killed

https://slate.com/culture/2016/05/bill-mcdowell-showcases-depression-era-farm-security-administration-photographs-in-his-book-ground.html

https://www.switchyardmag.com/issue-1/thekeptandthekilled

Performed by synthetic voices.

In 1976, in a classroom above Nassau Street, Garry Winogrand sorted a student's prints into a good pile and a bad pile and gave no reason except "It's a good photograph." When he died in 1984 he left thousands of rolls nobody had looked at, and the people who came after him had to decide what a Winogrand was. John Szarkowski called the late work an engine that wouldn't stop. Leo Rubinfien, Erin O'Toole and Sarah Greenough argued it showed a man who was unhappy with his own celebrated style.

Mae and Gus go through the backlog, the verdicts and the record of who actually picked Winogrand's famous frames. Then they ask what that means for anyone sitting on an unculled hard drive tonight.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Winogrand

https://www.eyeshotstreetphotography.com/garry-winogrand-the-rolls-he-never-saw/

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/arts/design/when-images-come-to-life-after-death.html

https://www.amazon.com/Winogrand-Figments-World-John-Szarkowski/dp/0870706357

https://collectordaily.com/winogrand-the-late-work-rubinfien-v-szarkowski/

https://www.sfmoma.org/press/release/first-major-touring-exhibition-of-garry-winogrand/

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-xpm-2013-mar-16-la-et-cm-ca-garry-winogrand-20130317-story.html

https://collectordaily.com/garry-winogrand-met/

https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/garry-winogrand-retrospective-2187/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/07/19/garry-winogrand-new-look-great-photographer/oc9ffaKyDPDIFLI7ZSfHrN/story.html

http://www.photogs.com/bwworld/winogrand.html

https://www.metmuseum.org/zh/art/collection/search/645624

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/111157

In March 1936, at a camp in Nipomo, California, Dorothea Lange made a handful of exposures of a mother and her children. One close-up became the face of the Great Depression. Ninety years on, we read the sequence like a contact sheet. We look at what falls out of the frame as she moves in, at what the captions got wrong, and at who actually made that close-up the keeper.

The woman in the picture, Florence Owens Thompson, wasn't publicly identified for more than forty years. When she was, her account didn't match the caption, and it didn't match Lange's memory either. We put both women's words side by side and don't pick a winner. Then we end on one small thing to do on Saturday: ask the name, write it down, send the print.

Sources:

https://guides.loc.gov/migrant-mother

https://guides.loc.gov/migrant-mother/images

https://arquivo.pt/wayback/20190328025028mp_/www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html

https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/336lange.html

https://www.history.com/articles/migrant-mother-new-deal-great-depression

https://www.loc.gov/item/2017762891/

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017762903/

https://www.newtimesslo.com/archive/2003-12-03/archives/cov_stories_2002/cov_01172002.html

https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/233

https://davidcampany.com/migrant-mother-1936-2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson

https://www.famouspictures.org/depression-mother/

https://brewminate.com/dorothea-lange-migrant-mother-and-photography-of-the-great-depression/

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/24/us/an-appeal-for-a-face-from-the-depression.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/17/obituaries/symbol-of-depression-dies-at-the-age-of-79.html

https://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/12/02/dustbowl.photo/

https://findingaids.loc.gov/repositories/19/resources/6115

https://analogphotoday.com/photography-news/the-migrant-mother-negatives-are-a-public-record/

https://www.tocatlian.com/news/photography/migrant-mother-wider-frame-florence-owens-thompson/

https://blog.newspapers.com/two-women-on-opposite-sides-of-the-lens/