Originally, I used this image in my first Omeka skill assignment. I chose it again for this skill assignment because I thought that it was a very poignant depiction of a common occurrence in the 1930’s. This photograph is of a farm auction that took place in Derby, Connecticut. In the 1930’s, auctions were common as farms foreclosed due to unpaid debt. Many farmers lost their land and their most valuable possessions because of these foreclosure auctions. 1
My historical question was: what new perspectives can I find from glitching the photograph of the farm auction? When I started the assignment for glitching the photograph, I wasn’t sure if I could tease out a meaning from an essentially corrupted image. However, I still went forward with the assignment, unsure if I would find something worth writing about. I borrowed my grandmother’s mac laptop, the only mac computer nearby, and I set to work. Thanks to the tutorial posted to slack by a fellow classmate, I managed to successfully glitch the photo. The first glitch split the auction crowd in two and flipped the left side to the right, and vice versa. The next glitch desaturated a large section of the photograph of most of its color, and the last glitch almost completely removed all of the color from the bottom half.
The glitches forced me to look at the photograph in a new way. However, it was not easy for me. I had to look at the photograph in a way that went “against the grain of history”. 2 The first thoughts that came to my mind when I saw the glitches were confused and unimpressed. How could I find a meaning or new perspective from a corrupted and disjointed picture? I stared at the photo and wracked my brain for several minutes.
Then I realized something about the subject of the photograph. The subject was that of a farm auction, an event that must have been very distressing for the people whose property and belongings were being sold off against their will. The glitched photograph showed the auction and its attendees as split up and almost completely erased from the image. As I examined the photograph, I thought of what it would’ve been like if these farmers did not have to auction off their lands and belongings, if these auctions had not occurred. Many people would not have been forced to move and find a life elsewhere. Many things would have been different, if those auctions did not happen.
Exhibit References
http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/farm-auction–derby–conn/farm-auction–derby–conn
http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/admin/items/show/177
References
Ganzel, Bill. Penny Auctions Fight Foreclosures during the Depression, https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/money_10.html.
Kramer, Michael J. “Glitching History: Using Image Deformance to Rethink Agency and Authenticity in the 1960s American Folk Music Revival.” Current Research in Digital History, http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-08-glitching-history/.
