Killed Negatives review – uncovering the dark heart of the Depression

Whitechapel Gallery, London
A small army of photojournalists were sent out to document America’s Great Depression. This exhibition reveals the pictures that were suppressed – with surreal and devastating results

The Great Depression inhabits modern memory like a malign shadow, always at the edge of our anxieties. Could things ever be that bad again? Are they, perhaps? The cataclysmic poverty and unemployment that swept the world after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 is a nightmare from history that warns that modernity does not always mean progress.

“There’s no way like the American way,” proclaims an upbeat poster photographed by Arthur Rothstein in 1937. Behind it stretches out an ashen wasteland strewn with beaten-up industrial sheds, a battered car and a facade far too sad for Edward Hopper to paint. Yet what finally kicks the last lethal shade of irony into Rothstein’s picture is a black hole that floats in the empty pale sky next to the poster. This deathly disc looks hungry, as if about to swallow the poster, the car, the sheds. It might be the Depression itself: a cancer in time, wasting hope away.

Related: Killed Negatives: censored 1930s America - in pictures

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