PART I:  the Farm SECURITY ADMINISTRATION ARCHIVES

Some time in the summer of 1999, the United States Library of Congress (LoC) began a monumental task: digitizing its entire collection for easier public access. [1] The collection — a vast expanse of documents, photography, drawings, and other artistic works — had already been catalogued in the decades before the rise of the modern internet. And yet as the world began a shift from the physical to the digital, the archivists and curators of the Library sensed a change was coming. Three years prior, in 1996, the Library had established exactly how they would digitize materials [2], but until the Mellon grant arrived in April of 1999, progress moved slowly. While email communication had been a staple of government work in the previous years, the public was slowly gaining easier access to commercial email and internet browsing services, forever altering the way that researchers (professional and amateur) approached historical materials. Thus the process began in earnest as the first hundred commercial scanners arrived at the Library, disappointing many of the Library’s more traditional, old-school scholars.

Popular media and news outlets paid little attention to the venture at the time. Mentioned briefly in write-ups about government spending, the task was alternately described as ‘herculean’, a ‘labor of love’, and occasionally as a ‘waste of resources’. It would take more than ten years for the large bulk of the collection to be digitized, including one of the most notable series in the collection, the Farm Security Administration’s expansive collection of photographs.

Commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was tasked with promoting Roosevelt’s New Deal through the use of photography. By photographing the living situations of Americans across the country, the goal was to shore up support for an increase in government spending to help fight poverty, primarily in rural America. [3] In order to accomplish this, the FSA dispatched 11 photographers to various locations throughout the United States. These photographers were given incredible freedom and lenience in their choice of subject matter, often only guided by a singular prompt, such as, “The baseball diamond as an important part of our general landscape”. [4]

Upon submitting their photography back to the FSA, their work was reviewed by project head Roy Emerson Stryker (1893–1975). By all reports, Mr. Stryker was a ‘no nonsense’ man; having served in World War I, he returned to academia following the war, where he was eventually plucked by a friend and former college professor to join the fledgling FSA. [5] The choice gave Stryker incredible power over the way that rural America was to be presented. Under his editorial vision, the FSA’s photography project generated an incredible 270,000 photographs, although not all images were meant to be seen publicly. Of the 270,000 photographs, roughly 100,000 — approximately 37%, or more than one in three — were purged under Stryker’s strict editorial standards. [6] These photographs were “killed”, as they came to be known, for many reasons: if the shot composition wasn’t strong enough; if the subject was captured better in other photographs; or even if Stryker was simply uncomfortable with the material produced.

Stryker himself had a peculiar way of indicating that a photograph was to be “killed”. In the early years, this was accomplished by the use of a hole punch, which was driven directly through the photograph’s negative, creating an ominous black circle in the middle of the image. When photographers objected, Stryker later moved to crossing the photograph out with a marker. Even that was still too much, however, and future “killed” photos would be mounted on a piece of paper with a printed blue star to indicate that they were unworthy of public consumption. [7] This did not save the previously discarded photographs, however, which escaped the loophole of government transparency by virtue of being artistic works, and were instead sent directly to the garbage can for destruction. These photos would not appear in the Library of Congress’ digitization efforts some 50 years later, and the missing 100,000 would forever go unseen.

Most of them, that is.

PART II: ARTHUR TRAILINS, AMATEUR ARCHIVIST

Little is certain about Arthur Trailins (alternately spelled Tralins or Trailings) beyond his birth in Roanoke, Illinois, in the year 1900. Orphaned at the age of five following an accident that claimed the lives of both his mother and father, Trailins spent his youth bouncing around various orphanages in New York City until the age of 18, at which time he enlisted in the United States Army.

The Army provided the clear structure and belonging that Arthur had desired during his childhood, and as his military service gradually became a career in his twenties and thirties, Trailins would soon find himself in Washington, D.C., performing administrative duties for the Resettlement Administration, which two years later would be reformed into the Farm Security Administration.

Due to his childhood in foster services, Arthur found it easy to make friends with those around him, and quickly grew a rapport with those around him. When a member of the cleaning staff mentioned in passing the large number of discarded photographs he saw each day, Trailins became curious, and asked to see the next batch of negatives that ended up in the trash can. Following the purchase of a photographer’s loupe, he began inspecting — and ultimately collecting — the more interesting negatives, filing them away in his desk at the Administration. This process continued until 1941 when America joined the second World War, and Arthur was reassigned to assist in the fledgling war effort.

Records indicate that Trailins grew ill in the winter of 1942 and, after a short bout of illness, passed away. Having left behind no family, his belongings were discarded or spread out among his friends, and his prized collection of photography negatives were split among those who knew him and shared in his interest in photographic history.

PART III: A MODERN REDISCOVERY

This is how, in the spring of 2020, I became involved with The Trailins Collection. Seeking a distraction during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself sorting through old boxes of family history, eventually stumbling upon a sealed tin with a collection of photo negatives inside. After extensive research — basically calling every member of my extended family to ask where the tin of photos came from — I have identified them as having belonged to Arthur Trailins, and have endeavored to present these photographs for the first time to the general public.

To my knowledge, these photographs have never been seen before. As they are not at the Library of Congress, they have not been digitized by them, and are likely not available to view anywhere else. They are presented here free from commentary, allowing the viewer themselves to speculate why Arthur would have chose to keep them over the undoubted thousands of others that would have crossed his desk.

A rough taxonomy of the photos divides them into seven classes:

1. ‘Farm’ photographs - These photographs depict farms and farmers, showing life in the rural countryside circa 1939.

2. ‘Industrial’ photographs - These photographs depict machinery, many of which would have been considered advanced technology upon their arrival.

3. ‘Interiors’ - These photographs are of the inside of buildings, including interesting rooms and hallways.

4. ‘Nature’ - These photographs depict nature around the country in the late 1930s.

5. ‘People’ - These photographs depict random people that FSA photographers would have encountered, whose publication rights likely could not be cleared during their lifetimes.

6. ‘Town’ photographs - These photographs depict small towns, homes, and industrial areas.

7. The other ones

These photographs represent an unseen side of Americana that might otherwise never have been seen. I’d like to thank you for taking this journey into the past with me, and hope that you’ll find the images as intriguing as I do.

Galleries

CITATIONS

[1] https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-99-017/mellon-foundation-gives-library-of-congress-grant-to-digitize-hannah-arendt-papers/1999-04-14/
[2] https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/formatold.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_Security_Administration
[4] Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935–1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 7; 187–88.
[5] Forrest Jack Hurley, “To Document a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography by the Farm Security Administration” (Tulane University, 1971).
[6] Allen C. Benson, "Killed Negatives: The Unseen Photographic Archives", Archivaria (2009): 1–37.
[7] Richard K. Doud, “Oral History Interview with Edwin and Louise Rosskam, 1965 August 3”, Archives of American Art.

ADDITIONAL NOTES >>