The Boy Soldiers series depicts American children at play. Specifically, the photographs show the young participants of organized battle reenactments. They clutch their weapons, they fall down dead, they confront the camera with bravery. I am interested in how patriotism gets passed down through generations in the United States. To what extent and through what mechanisms are our natural impulses to tell stories and perform war games developed and/or hijacked while we are still young? Is a re-enactor child equipped with a cultivated historical consciousness or an inoculation against the sights and sounds of battle to the point of being desensitized to the gravities of war?
This year’s MFA Open Studios were a smashing success for the Photo Department. It was a lively day filled with family, friends, and fellow artists. We had a good selection of work hanging outside the grad seminar room in our Triangle Gallery, highlighted by an interesting multi-media piece exploring Civil War reenactment by Rebekah Flake. We deployed some trickery by luring people into our studios with Federal Donuts and Joe Hocker’s specially brewed coffee, but once they were here and we started talking about art the interaction exceeded our expectations. It gets kinda lonely down here in the basement sometimes, and it was nice to feel so connected to everyone, if only for a weekend. Thanks to everyone who took the time to stop by…see you next year!
The Stryker Bullet Series
In the Stryker Bullet Series photo-installation I combine and repurpose rejected photographs,
created by the Farm Security Administration Photography Project, during the years of the Great Depression. The black holes of the punched negatives become a metaphor for the violent impact of the Depression on human lives. The feelings of instability, fear and despair that rise in the threat of a similar financial crisis today imply a close connection of the historical imagery with contemporary audiences. Additionally, the lack of image information gives out more clues than is supposed to, about the role of censorship and politics in troubled times, questioning at the same time photography's documentary function.
Information about the source material
This series is made of high-resolution digital scans of unidentified 35 mm negatives that were created between 1935 and 1939. They are part of the FSA Photographic Archive in the Library of Congress, consisting of almost 145,000 photographs that were commissioned by the government agency of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. Roy E. Stryker headed the project, which included photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The aim was to document the worker’s hardship and the nation’s conditions at the nadir of the Depression, distributing at the same time free images for use in newspapers and publications.
Although not a photographer himself, Stryker planned out specific shooting scripts and was
responsible for reviewing the exposed negatives and selecting the ones that would be printed.
His authority was more evident in the way he treated the rejected negatives: he would punch
holes into them, deleting parts of the image and making them unusable for reproduction. Around 68,000 negatives were rejected and listed as “Killed”. His punch is thought to have reflected not only his editorial preferences, but also the Roosevelt Administration ideology.
