In 2016, UVM photography professor Bill McDowell published a book, Ground, of images that were “killed” by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s. Documenting the landscapes and agriculture of the time, the photos had rarely been viewed until McDowell chose to highlight them. This fall, they are being introduced to an even broader audience through their inclusion in a new display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
The display highlights the work of three contemporary photographers who have produced work inspired by past American photography surveys, a commonly used method to map and measure the land. (The other featured photographers are Binh Danh and An-My Le.) It has been installed as a modern interface to a major historical exhibition, Much Here Is Beautiful: Survey Photographs of the United States, 1860s to Today, which showcases photographs taken directly from several photographic surveys.
McDowell first came across a “killed” negative—one that had been rejected and rendered supposedly unusable via a hole punched through it—back in 2002 while reading a review of a book on FSA photographs. “I was captivated by the photograph. The black hole in it from the hole punch completely upended an otherwise straightforward documentary image,” he says. “I remember thinking, I wish I had made that.”
Intrigued, McDowell found his way to the Library of Congress’s catalog of FSA photographs and began downloading thousands of “killed” negatives. “In the beginning, there was no logic behind what I chose to download aside from a gut reaction that the image might later be useful,” he says. “I was responding simply to the visual dynamic of the hole punch and following an instinct that something, eventually, could be made from it.”
After spending hundreds of hours looking at the images, many of which were taken during the Great Depression, he narrowed his focus to photographs highlighting the land. “It’s what we share most profoundly with Depression-era America,” he says. “We stand on the same land, and from it we need to harvest the essentials to survive: food, water, and shelter.”
At first, McDowell planned to counter the destruction of the negatives by repairing them. But when he looked at the damaged and restored images side by side, he realized the “killed” negatives were more compelling. So, he adjusted his approach.
“I selected 61 ‘killed’ negative photographs for the book that I carefully sequenced as a long visual poem,” McDowell says. Periodically he added a cropped version of one of the photographs in which the hole was positioned right in the center of the frame. “Here, the hole becomes the main subject and everything else in the frame revolves around it,” he says, noting that the hole is both an action and a mark. “There’s a violent and destructive exercise in the making of these images that is reflective of the name given to them, ‘killed.’ The black hole alters our reading of the frame and may even impact the perceived meaning of the picture.”
Though the negatives he chose to work with were found in an archive, McDowell says that the Ground project isn’t about preserving a historical record—after all, the only reason the “killed” negatives still exist is that they were physically attached to other negatives thought to be more important. Instead, he has created his own narrative from the photographs. “There isn’t a specific message I’m trying to impart,” McDowell says. “Rather, I’m sharing a group of photographs that I feel have a powerful relational affinity for each other and that offer a view on America. What that view might be is dependent both on the photographs and on the viewer.”
The Smithsonian display, which will remain for a year, will include a number of both cropped and uncropped photos from Ground. Recognition of this work by the Institution is particularly meaningful for McDowell, who notes that the project required years of commitment with no certainty about how it would be received. “It’s easy to second guess oneself, and you just don’t know if a project in the early stages is going to have legs,” McDowell says. “It’s a sweet affirmation that photography curators whose work I greatly respect have found value in these photographs.”
