Essay: “The Kept And The Killed”

During the Depression years in the USA, the Farm Services Administration hired photographers to document the plight of farmers trying to survive under the weight of the financial meltdown coupled with an environmental collapse known as the Dust Bowl. Over 270,000 images were made, about a third of which were edited out by project leader, Roy Emerson Stryker. His “do not print” decision was obvious, as he physically damaged the negative. Essayist Erika X. explains in this essay for the Public Domain Review.

Untitled FSA image by Theodore Jung, 1935, public domain