Hacker News Reader

Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting, but I could do without the conspiracy theory: "But back then the desire to show the places and faces of America in the mire was controlled to fit a message."

Which is utter nonsense. They were blackholed simply because he felt they weren't good photos. Plenty of very similar photos were published.

There was zero "message control" here.

Here is a direct link to the photos: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=%22hole+punch%22&co=f... without the false conspiracy theory commentary.

If you browse the photos you'll see most are simply poor, or duplicate photos, and if you click through you'll find links to similar photos that were published.

@dang if you see this, could you change the url to the loc.gov link and the title to "The Black Hole Photographs: Unpublished Images from America’s Great Depression"

View on HN

You are absolutely right.

For example, here's the allegedly "censored" picture of a young woman carrying cranberries: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017723882/resource/

And here's the very next photo on the film, without a hole punch: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8a10082/

The only thing this tells us is that the editor preferred the wide angle shot.

That's unfortunate, I find the blackholed photo much better in every single way than the wide shot. I guess that tells us more about the specific editor, the audience and context, or maybe just the stylistic choices of the day.

Interesting that it appears the cranberries are being harvested in dry fields. I always assumed that flooding was an old harvesting technique.

Looks like they used both ways to harvest cranberries.

Boy with cranberry scoop: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017723915/resource/

Gathering cranberries in a flooded bog (not sure what a bog is): https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017723887/resource/

Yeah, it doesn't look to me like the holes are something being removed to conceal it; I don't think the holes' positioning is strategic. The way it looks to me, is that the holes are just to render the negative unusable.

That is, I think it's vandalism. Even if the focus is a bit dodgy, I don't see the point in mutilating negatives like that.

I think it's a bit extreme to call it vandalism. Presumably the editor didn't give much thought to the archival value of the "reject" photos.

It's a bit easy to armchair quarterback now, when we can preserve and access data so readily. But I suspect a contemporary editor would have had no idea that anybody would ever want to look at the b-roll.

> a contemporary editor would have had no idea that anybody would ever want to look at the b-roll.

In that case, why was it necessary to mutilate the negatives? Why not just chuck them in the skip? That's why I called it vandalism.

I don't know what they used in depression era cameras, but at least with "modern" roll of film (i.e. 35mm) the "negatives" are one strip of film containing one image after the other. You don't have individual "photos" as individual physical artifacts, they're just one small part of the strip on which they're taken.

So if you're going to develop a roll of film, but don't want to develop everything, you could just mark the shots you don't want in some way (i.e. a hole punch or a marker) and you'd know to skip them.

Yes, that's a plausible explanation. I think I noticed sprocket holes on at least one of the frames.

It still seems rather destructive; celluloid film was pricey, so I thought they used to re-use it.

The headline is basically clickbait. Content is fine.

The photos in the content are fine, the words on the other hand are mostly false.

It's a different kind of conspiracy argument, but it reminds me of the point made by moon-landing sceptics that all the photos are too well framed considering the cameras were chest mounted and hard to use.

Of course the reason for that is simple, the moon equivalent of "Aunt Ethel with half her head out of the frame" were simply never widely published. What got published were the ones that looked good.

How are you so easily making the distinction between "person in power doesn't want to post photos because he doesn't like them" and "person in power doesn't want to post photos because it shows something they don't like"?

> Plenty of very similar photos were published.

Do you have an example, from when this person was leading the organization?

I gave you a link. Click on it. Pick a random photo, there will be a link to a published similar photo in the description of the photo.

The censored nonsense in the article is simply not true.

For anyone else, you have to click the text under the photo, or "About This Item" if the actual photo is clicked.

I thought the same thing "mh looks very quickly punched like marking a picture".

Tx for correcting it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com