Unsettling Flows at Adjacent to Life

Adjacent To Life, presents Unsettling Flows by Sam Markwell .

The photographs presented in Unsettling Flows were produced by a handful of temporary employees of New Deal programs in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Indian Affairs during the late 1930s and early 40s.

This was a moment of widespread soil erosion, environmental degradation, and social dispossession amid rising global fascism. It was also a time of lively experimentation by tribal leaders, white reformers and settler farmers who looked to revive old—and forge new—ways of living in mutually beneficial relationships with each other and the land. Since the 1940s security has taken on an increasingly militarized meaning, but the images here reflect a more expansive view of social and ecological security envisioned in the context of the New Deal.

These photographs are curated in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s theory of historical images, which he developed in writings from the 1920s through his death in 1940. For Benjamin, the space between the now of the present viewer and the then of the past photograph is not a distance that separates. Rather, it is an “interval of reflection” charged with the intensity of possible connections between past, present and future.

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Note: These images are held by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration as part of the public domain, and they can be reproduced without special permission. Images of Native American tribal lands and citizens were submitted to tribal government offices of the relevant Pueblo Indian tribal nations, all of which were determined to be fit for reproduction and display.

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Unsettling Flows is on view through August 8, 2025 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Artist's reception: Wednesday, July 16, 6:30 - 8:30 pm.