Courtesy the artist and Harris Lieberman, New York

“This project uses as its source material Walker Evans' "killed" negatives from the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) photographic archive in the U.S. Library of Congress. The term "killed" refers to images in the archive that were not intended to be published or printed and therefore had holes punched through the negative. I printed up the original hole-punched negatives and attempted to think of the hole as a generative space, a space to look through a historical image into the present. I then photographed in color what I thought might be missing and printed only the ‘hole’ in an otherwise black sheet of photographic paper. In some instances, I photographed two possible interpretations of the missing hole. The photographs, either in pairs or triples, hang together. This project also refers to Sherrie Levine’s re-photographing of similar Evans photographs in her seminal 1981 project, After Walker Evans.”

- Lisa Oppenheim -