You should RTA.
You should get Gimp, it’s free and great!
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It seems that many more of these ruined photos were published here:
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If you look at the whole collection, it’s apparent that many of the punched negatives are both superfluous and technically flawed. I mean, if you have four or five pictures of the same pig, the ones that are poorly exposed get tossed, and the rest kept as candidates for publication.
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the second one looks like a cover for an Art Speigelman depression graphic novel…
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My word that’s terrible. Some really captivating photos that were defaced.
I hadn’t read about that yet! What a strange internet hole. And that image… man, i gotta go to sleep now.
That doesn’t begin to address how the pig might feel about it.
Take Farmer Tronson
Here’s the hole.
And here are two photos that made the grade:
Here’s the Meridian House with hole
and without
With Hole:
and without
With hole:
and without
It would be different if the punched negatives told a story that was suppressed. That would be interesting. But from what I can see, the guy in charge thought that other shots of the same subjects made the grade, and these did not.
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I don’t know. Why punch a hole through them instead of marking the edge of the film like is normally done? When I shot on film, I saved even the bad ones for reference. This was done in a day when film and processing were costly, and even having a reference for how you got the exposure wrong or improperly framed the shot was valuable. There also seem to be a fair number of them that don’t have better angles or exposures.
Precisely. While there may have been better alternatives in some cases, the destruction of the negatives in such a heavy handed way seems unnecessary and excessive.
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What if this were just a technique to avoid getting confused about which one is the “good” photo in a set with similar ones? After all, the guy in charge was an economist, not an art director.
As the article said, these were cherry picked to show how much the hole punches could affect the photographs. However, there’s plenty of great photos in that collection here at Library of congress without hole punches!
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Some articles on Roy Stryker’s philosophy:
http://thegreatdepressionphotos.com/roy-stryker/
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-roy-emerson-stryker-12480
The second link is to an oral history. Quite long, and I’m not sure that I’m that good at summarizing oral histories, but to describe Stryker as a mere economist diminishes his role. His first job in what might be considered photodocumentation was on the production of an economics textbook with Rexford Tugwell, and he got his job at the FSA on the basis of his skills as a Photo Editor.
The nypl also has a selection of FSA photographs.
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