There are significant moments when utility and art cross paths. I don’t mean Walter Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction. Instead, it’s an intersection when the genesis for an artwork is also the root of its demise. In this case, I have been swamped by the Farm Security Administrations archive of photographs made by Walker Evans. He certainly wasn’t the only artist, nor the only photographer, to be hired on by the federal government during the period of 1937-1942, but his images are easily among the strongest. I can get lost in them. And yet, there’s a part of his portfolio from the FSA that knocks me off balance even more. The “killed” negatives. A negative is killed when a hole puncher is used to destroy the film itself, to purposefully render the image unusable. As a photographer, this action struck me as drastic. Immediately after the shock subsided, I started to appreciate the violation of an icon, to look more closely at how the entire composition shifted. Killed image after killed image I felt like I could perceive when a negative had been hole punched by different people simply by the placement of the hole. How it interacted with the image on the film. The persons willingness to punch out a face, or did they avoid hitting a person and put a big empty circle in the sky instead?