William E. Jones "Punctured"

Andrew Roth

poster for William E. Jones "Punctured"

This event has ended.

William E. Jones foraged the photographic archives of the Library of Congress determined to uncover evidence of queer culture embedded in the ‘pictorial record of American life’ created under Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration (1935-44). In the course of his investigation he discovered a quantity of “killed” negatives, those Stryker destroyed with a hole-puncher. It became evident that Stryker used the hole-puncher as a form of censorship; Jones states: “Some of the punched holes seemed to have punished waste at the same time that they expressed an editorial preference.” After searching thousands of photographs, Jones was successful in locating 157 killed images out of approximately 68,000 Stryker rejected.

Punctured presents the digital files of 100 images in a 4 minute, 56 second sequenced loop. On the occasion of this exhibition PPP Editions has published Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration. Cloth-bound and printed in tri-tone, the suite of killed images are organized alphabetically by photographer: Walker Evans, Theodor Jung, Carl Mydans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn and John Vachon. Alongside these images, Jones includes a selection from John Collier, Jr., Russell Lee and David Myers that illustrate possible evidence of homosexuality within the main stream. He states: “Many (perhaps even most) viewers would find in the archive not a trace of homosexuality, but I refused to believe that it was completely absent from the visual record of the Great Depression. An historical queer presence must have been documented, if only unconsciously or accidentally, by the photographers of the FSA.”

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from September 10, 2010 to October 22, 2010

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