Roy Stryker was given a daunting task: to visualize the problems of the Great Depression and the solutions offered Hoover Administration. He recognized that creating visual narratives in the collection would be vital to the project’s success. To Stryker, visual narratives meant both designated “photo series” by individual photographers and uniting the full collection under certain narrative themes. Finnegan identifies three “narrative trajectories” that Stryker sought to build throughout the complete collection: the American small-town story, the tenancy story and the war story (Finnegan 44).

More than 117,000 negatives from the FSA project are available online through the Library of Congress, including hundreds, if not thousands of killed negatives. Unfortunately, however, killed negatives often do not come up in searches because they do not have keywords. Therefore, I wanted to create a series of larger, photo-only galleries to give easier access to some of these killed negatives.

In this gallery I have collected additional killed photographs which I perceive to relate to Stryker’s “war story”. This gallery is smaller than the other two because the beginning of the United States’ involvement in WWII roughly coincided with period when Stryker changed his editing style and moved away from punching holes into negatives. There are still many untitled images – indicating they were unpublished – available from this narrative trajectory, they just were not permanently marked by Stryker.