The Kept and the Killed (2022)

Summary

Punning on the pinhole history of early photographic technologies like the camera obscura, Roland Barthes used the word punctum (literally, “sting, speck, cut, little hole”) to name the disarming effect of certain images. “A photograph’s punctum”, he wrote, “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”. In the killed negatives, we find Barthes’ dictum literalized: it is the little hole or holes themselves that arrest our eyes and imagination. The strange contradiction at the heart of the killed negatives — as the very existence of this essay attests — is that in an important sense they weren’t killed: the hole-punched photos remain in the Library of Congress, preserved by Stryker himself, and the Pittsburgh Photography Library images deemed unfit for the archives have instead come to comprise their own separate archive in the same building, a sort of Salon des Refusés. Allen Benson writes that the “entombment” of these images “produces a contradictory effect, a desire to look, to open the killed storage boxes and inspect the remains”. When we do look, we find that, whatever the organic center of the original photo’s gravity may be, the void has usurped it and become, suddenly, the focal point. In the subtle but unmistakable way that Stryker’s puncture marks reveal the three-dimensional negative from which each two-dimensional image is printed, they call our attention to the fact that a photograph is a physical object and a fragile one at that. And yet at the same time it’s difficult not to feel a visceral reel as a hole slices through the head of a child, the face of a young mother. Stryker’s rejects present us with a push-pull of mimesis: the scenes become less real even as they become more emotionally immediate.