Another take on FSA "punched" images

Not a comment that I think a lot of, actually

Killed Negatives review – uncovering the dark heart of the Depression

The

Phoenix

Rises......

Amusingly ironic that a thread on punched photos was punched.

Edited July 9, 2018 by Moving On

The black hole is the handiwork of Roy Stryker, the director of the FSA’s documentary photography program. He was responsible for hiring photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein and Gordon Parks and dispatching them across the country to document the struggles of the rural poor.

While I think that it was an awful thing to do to these negatives my point of view is nearly a century down the road. The black circles do offer a sort of stark counterpoint but nowadays I wonder how many of those could be 'repaired' with Photoshop or other software.

 

Rick H.

When we picture the Great Depression we see rural America, even though its effects reached to Wigan Pier and Weimar Berlin. That is because a daring initiative of Roosevelt’s New Deal created some of the most haunting photographs CCleaner Happy Wheels VLC of poverty ever taken.

Selling the New Deal with pictures......

 

It all depends on who is buying and who is selling......

 

Roosevelt’s or Reagan’s America? A Time for Choosing

 

“Roosevelt and his fellow progressives rejected the idea of natural differences between men, insisting that those differences arise only out of social and economic inequality. As a result, they redefined the idea of freedom, divorcing it from the idea of individual rights and identifying it instead with the idea of security. It was in the cause of this new understanding of freedom that America’s constitutional form of limited government was gradually replaced—beginning with the New Deal and culminating in the late 1960s and 1970s—by an administrative or welfare state.”

 

“…“the full power of centralized government” was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.”

 

The power of a photo indeed......

FDR: The Man, the Leader, the Legacy | Ralph Raico

Edited July 19, 2018 by Moving On

“Not to Inform but to Move”

 

 

The FSA started the tradition by contributing to the society through their pictures during the Great Depression, and their motto was simply as Beaumont Newhall insists, "not to inform us, but to move us."[citation needed] Those photographers wanted the government to move and give a hand to the people as they were completely neglected and overlooked and thus they decided to start taking photographs in a style that we today call "documentary photography." The FSA photography has been influential thanks to its realist point of view, and the fact that it works as frame of reference and an educational tool for later generations to learn from. Society has benefited and will benefit from it for more years to come, as this photography can unveil the ambiguous and question the conditions that are taking place.[14]

.............

Creating false perceptions of individuals (A prime example of situational manipulation), the RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935–1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the plight of poor farmers. The Information Division of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public. Under Roy Stryker, the Information Division of the FSA adopted a goal of "introducing America to Americans." Many of the most famous Depression-era photographers were fostered by the FSA project. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks were three of the most famous FSA alumni.[15] The FSA was also cited in Gordon Parks' autobiographical novel, "A Choice of Weapons."

 

Farm Security Administration - Wikipedia