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House in Lockland, Ohio. [Shows photographer's shadow. Hole punched in negative by Farm Security Administration staff to indicate negative should not be printed.]: photo by Carl Mydans, December 1935 for U.S. Resettlement Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Carl Mydans' blight -- a black hole
involving yourself in the situation)
punched in the negative
Cheap partly-constructed houses lacking water and sewage, Lockland, Ohio. [Image not circulated, because it shows photographer's shadow.]: photo by Carl Mydans, December 1935 for U.S. Resettlement Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
3 comments:
Tom,
Thanks for bringing Carl Mydans' blight, and shadow, back to light.
3.2
light coming into clouds above shadowed
ridge, song sparrow calling from branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
“strokes” in the background,
noted certain details
happened for the first time,
that such is, as this
cloudless blue sky reflected in channel,
sunlit green shoulder of ridge above it
Thanks Steve, lovely to glimpse through overcast here that sunlit green shoulder of the ridge, there: all these details happening for the first and last time, over and over...
Over these five years of slowly working through the 160,000 black and white negatives in the FSA files, I've grown increasingly interested in the curious archival "negation" of some of the negatives, sometimes by strike-through markings, sometimes by the black-dot method -- invariably the negatives are designated as "not for circulation" whenever the photographer's shadow appears.
But of course the shadows remind us that somebody had to be there, setting up the composition, taking the picture.
Some more of the work of the great photojournalist Carl Mydans:
Carl Mydans: In the Shadow of the Capitol (I)
Carl Mydans: In the Shadow of the Capitol (II)
Carl Mydans: Narrow Street/ Samuel Beckett: Neither
Carl Mydans: Trapped
Carl Mydans: Unknowable Communities
As for who was (and still is) responsible for the "Curse of the Blight," the shadow knows, right?
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