America in Color: Image Analysis

Presented within a context, photographs may present a very different story from the reality captured within the photograph itself.  Without the embellishment of context, however, the viewer has more freedom to interpret an image at face value.  A blog post from the Denver Post on July 26, 2010 hosts a series of color photographs taken between 1939 and 1943.  Each of these photographs was given at most a few sentences describing their origin.  Additionally, given the age of the photographs, one can feel confident that the images presented were unaltered from their original form.   

One photograph in particular captures news headlines which were posted on the windows of the Brockton Enterprise in 1940.  Today, we have access to events all over the world at the touch of a screen or the click of a computer mouse.  It is difficult to imagine reading the day’s news from a piece of paper attached to a building window, and yet this was precisely what the people from this photograph did.  A few seemed to be reading the headlines, while others were simply walking by.  They didn’t seem to be trying to impress anyone.  They didn’t attempt to present a certain reality to the viewer.  They probably weren’t concerned about the potential thoughts of someone over seventy years later. 

The people in the photograph inhabited about one-third of the total image.  No one person was the focus, nor was the group as a whole.  The central focus was the window of news headlines.  It is in the center of photograph and occupies approximately as much space as the group of people, however the remainder of the photograph gives a context to the window.  These news headlines also give context to the photograph as a whole.  Through these headlines, one could discern the approximate date on which the photograph was taken even without the contextual sentences.  Even though the headlines were hand written, each was still legible; the color contrast between each headline and its summary helped distinguish one from another.

The photograph has a considerable amount of brown tones.  This brown gives the photograph a sense of age even beyond the architecture.  Everyone in the photograph is wearing a heavy coat, which leads to the belief of a cold day, especially combined with the observation that all of the people had their hands in their pockets and are wearing hats.  The picture tells its own story.  Rather than an attempt to sell a product or idea, the photograph simply takes the viewer back in time to a small town in Massachusetts on a cold December day in 1940.