Ground: A Reprise of Photographs from the Farm Security Administration

Ground assembles photographs from the Farm Security Administration archive that were never meant to be seen: negatives Roy Stryker rejected by driving a hole punch through the frame rather than discarding the film.

Bill McDowell first came across a print made from one of these "killed" negatives in an article on Michael Lesy's Long Time Coming and returned to the FSA archive to build a book around the mark itself. Ground gathers duotone reproductions, many previously unpublished, including 1936 photographs Walker Evans made toward Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, alongside work by Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Paul Carter, Theodor Jung, Carl Mydans, and Arthur Rothstein. McDowell sequenced the 176-page hardcover by how the black hole sits in and abstracts each image, with an introduction by Jock Reynolds and texts by Rosanne Cash and Wendell Berry.

A photographer and University of Vermont professor, McDowell treats Stryker's punch as a found intervention, a bureaucratic mark that reads, eighty years on, as a contemporary gesture of erasure laid over Depression-era documentary photography.