FSA Archives

Showing reality also means hiding part of it. Screens reveal and conceal the world. There is always a hidden part.
Even our eyes have a blind spot. There is an area of the retina where the optic nerve connects and where there are no photoreceptor cells (cones and rods), so light is not detected and no image is formed. It is a small area where we see nothing, but the brain compensates for or invents this lack of information. A black hole in the middle of our gaze.

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a US agency founded as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal policy to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States.
The FSA was famous for its photography programme from 1935 to 1944, which sought to document the harsh living conditions in rural America. The photographs in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection constitute an extensive record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This photography project was directed for most of its existence by Roy Stryker.
Among the photographers who participated in this documentation programme were the renowned Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, among others.
The FSA image collection is the most famous embodiment of a broader movement that crystallised the documentary trend during the 1930s. Indeed, it was at this time that the idea of a documentary genre with its own theory and aesthetics emerged in both photography and cinema.
Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the FSA to document the Great Depression, more than a third were discarded.
The images rejected by the project director, Roy Emerson Stryker, were drilled through with a drill to render the negative unusable. Many of these excluded and marked images are preserved in the same archive at the Library of Congress.
Authors and researchers such as Erica X Eisen and Bill McDowell have investigated this hidden legacy to reveal what was not meant to be seen. One America had to be shown in order to cancel out the other side of America.
If we want to examine which images Stryker considered worthy of being saved from the drill, we must also consider which images he considered worthy of photographing in the first place.
The plan was to document the harsh conditions of the cotton fields of Alabama, but at the same time to highlight the heroic resistance of poor Americans who looked to the future with hope. The photographs were intended to reinforce the implementation of the FSA's own policies. The farmers portrayed had to be worthy of receiving state aid, which is why we find that Latinos and Native Americans are underrepresented and that white families are much more prominent than those of African descent.

The photographs were intended to reinforce the implementation of the FSA's own policies. The farmers portrayed had to be worthy of receiving state aid, which is why we find that Latinos and Native Americans are underrepresented and white families are much more prominent than those of African descent.

With the passage of time, the discarded images tell us much more about the history of the Great Depression. The black hole of Stryker's drill has ended up revealing what was meant to be hidden. This exhibition, America and Mr. Stryker's Drill, awakens our awareness of a blind spot in our gaze that should help us gain a deeper insight into things. In the black hole of the negatives live a present time and a past time, and it is our eyes that fill them with light.