The New York Public L i b r a r y
presents
An Artist Dialogue Series Event
Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration
William E. Jones and Andrew Roth
Wednesday September 8, 2010
6:00 p.m.
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum
Room 227 (2nd Floor)
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
476 Fifth Avenue
5th Avenue and 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018
212-340-0871
www.nypl.org
directions
Room 227 opens to public at 5:30 p.m.
All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation.
Publisher Andrew Roth and artist William E. Jones discuss the new book Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration which is the first publication to deal exclusively with the 35mm negatives that Farm Security Administration director Roy Stryker killed with a hole punch during the early years of the project (1935-39). There will be a screening of Jones’ recent video Killed, a rapidly edited sequence of 130 digital files scanned from negatives in the collection of the Library of Congress.
The book brings to light destroyed or defaced photographs by Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and others in the fine reproductions; it also includes two essays by Jones discussing the images and possible reasons for their suppression.
Copies of Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration are available for purchase and signing at the event.
William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who grew up in Ohio and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997); several short videos, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998); the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004); and many video installations. His work has been shown at the Cinémathèque française and Musée du Louvre, Paris; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Kunsthalle Wien and Vienna International Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was included in the 1993 and 2008 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work was also on view in the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. His films and videos were the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern, London, in 2005, and at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010. Jones has published the following books: Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (2008) and Heliogabalus (2009).
Andrew Roth specializes in selling rare photographic and artists’ books from the 20th century, while also publishing limited edition books under his imprint PPP Editions. He maintains a gallery in New York exhibiting the work of photographic artist’s from the 60s and 70s, as well as contemporary art. Over the past 10 years he has presented exhibitions by key Japanese artists Makoto Aida, Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Tadanori Yokoo, Keizo Kitajima, and most recently, Ishiuchi Miyako. He has also presented solo exhibitions with Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Robert Heinecken, Ed Ruscha, Collier Schorr and David Wojnarowicz, to name but a few. In 2001, he edited and published The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century — a primer on the history of the photographic book, which went on to help define the rare photographic book market of today. Recent publications include Larry Clark's Punk Picasso, Leigh Ledare's Pretend You’re Actually Alive, Male: from the Collection of Vince Aletti, In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists since 1955 and in 2010, Ishiuchi Miyako’s Sweet Home Yokosuka 1976-1980 and William E. Jones’ Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration.
Initiated in 2004, Artist Dialogues Series provide a forum for understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. Artists are paired with critics, curators, gallerists, writers or other artists to converse about art and the potential of exploring new ideas.
