In Ground, Bill McDowell has assembled photographs made from the “killed” negatives of noted practitioners who were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) from 1934-1943 to document the plight of poor farmers in America during the Great Depression. The FSA photography division was run by Roy Stryker, who routinely defaced FSA negatives with a hole punch to prevent them from being printed, much to the consternation of the photographers.
McDowell first encountered a print made from a FSA “killed” negative in a magazine article about Michael Lesy’s book Long Time Coming (2002) about FSA Photography. He had a powerful, almost visceral reaction to the image. He was struck by how the presence and placement of the black hole imbued the picture made over sixty years ago with a sense of immediacy and a new visual vocabulary that could be used poetically in the current moment.
McDowell downloaded the photographs for his project from the Library of Congress website which is home to the FSA’s archive of over 145,000 images. The FSA photographers represented in Ground are: Paul Carter, Walker Evans, Theodor Jung, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott. The book includes several photographs from 1936 that Walker Evans had made for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book he published with James Agee.
McDowell organized the pictures of sharecroppers, farm laborers, homesteaders, resettlement officials, homes and farmland according to how and what they represent and the manner in which the black hole rendered by Stryker’s “violent” act abstracts them.
In Ground, the hole is portrayed as a contemporary mark, current with the practice of intervention, alteration, and appropriation. This provides the book’s haunting photographs a temporal duality in which they present the post-Depression era through a contemporary filter. In our continuing struggle to recover from 2008’s Great Recession these photographs speak of now, even as they confer on past government programs, race and class, damaged and bountiful land, drought, flood, and exodus.
BOOK
Bill Mcdowell: Ground
A Reprise of Photographs from the Farm Security Administration
Introduction by Jock Reynolds, Lyrics by Rosanne Cash, Poem by Wendell Berry, Interview by DJ Hellerman
Daylight Books
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1942084129
8.75 x 11.75 inches
176 pages; duotone photographs
https://daylightbooks.org
