Killed Negatives: The Unseen Photographic Archives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much has been written about Roy E. Stryker’s large-scale photographic projects with the Farm Security Administration in Washington, DC and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey – projects lasting from 1935 to 1950. This paper is devoted to one of his less well-known projects, the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (1950–1955), and the archives that subsequently evolved from this project. Within this picture archives there is a subset of images that for over fifty years were mostly inaccessible; since the end of the project in 1955, they were boxed-up and stored out of sight. Stryker and his photographers referred to these images as kills or killed negatives . First, the paper offers a broad historical overview of Stryker’s career and his relationship to photography leading up to the start of the Pittsburgh Photographic Library. Second, the paper examines the nature of Stryker’s killed negatives, recontextualizing them as archival photographic records and explores the discursive boundaries at work between surrounding text, editorial markings, and the images themselves. Third, the paper demonstrates that meaning can be derived not just from what records archivists bring to life through their arrangement and descriptive practices, but also through those records that remain buried in their vaults. RESUME On a beaucoup ecrit au sujet des projets photographiques a grande echelle de Roy E. Stryker avec la Farm Security Administration a Washington et la Standard Oil Company du New Jersey, projets qui ont eu lieu entre 1935 et 1950. Cet article est consacre a l’un de ses projets les moins biens connus, la Pittsburgh Photographic Library (1950-1955), et aux archives qui ont ete creees par ce projet. Ces archives photographiques contiennent des ensembles d’images qui, pendant plus de cinquante ans, etaient pour la plupart inaccessibles; depuis la fin du projet en 1955, elles avaient en effet ete emboitees et entreposees. Stryker et ses photographes qualifiaient ces images de « mises a mort » (« kills »), ou de « negatifs mis a mort » (« killed negatives »). Dans un premier temps, cet article offre un apercu historique de la carriere de Stryker et de sa relation avec la photographie jusqu’au debut de la Pittsburgh Photographic Library. Ensuite, il examine la nature de ses « negatifs mis a mort », en les traitant comme des documents d’archives photographiques, tout en explorant les frontieres discursives entre le texte environnant, les annotations de redaction et les images elles-memes. Enfin, l’article montre que l’on peut donner un sens non seulement aux documents que les archivistes ont mis en valeur en les classant et en les decrivant, mais aussi aux documents qui demeurent caches dans leurs voutes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it