Killed Photos
This piece has come about after reading about the ‘killed photos’ from a 1930’s American farm documentation project funded by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.
Photographers were sent out to document the life of poor and destitute farmers. Over 270,000 photos were taken, but approximately 100,000 of them were deemed unfit for use and were ‘killed’ -using the language of the project administrator- by hole punching them.