There are times when an image just comes together. You know it when you see it. The Water Fountain at the Henderson County Courthouse conveys more information than a man simply taking a drink from a water fountain. There are multiple points of interest in the photo as the eye is unconsciously drawn into the photo in order to fully comprehend the scene in front of the courthouse.
A photograph needs to have something to say beyond the obvious in order to have some significance. It should almost border on the subliminal in that it communicates an unconscious social statement to some symbolic degree. Such images are difficult to find. I believe that “Hell’s Kitchen” is such an image.
I must have been about eight years old when I had bad feelings that someday I might be homeless if my life did not work out for some reason. An irrational fear to be sure, but perhaps peniaphobia (fear of poverty) or kakkorraphiaphobia (fear of failure) come closest in describing these fears
In my Master’s thesis I explored the role of the media with respect to the period of the “Indian Wars”, specifically the period from the outbreak of hostilities in May 1862 in Minnesota to the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on December 29, 1890. Previous treaties between the United States and the Lakota and Cheyenne Nations respecting territory ended with the passage of the Homestead Act as white settlers moved into Indian territory.
It might be argued by the uninformed that manual labor in the southern cotton fields of the United States ended with the conclusion of the Civil War and the adoption of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The abolition of slavery and the industrialization of the United States, the argument continues, had reduced the need for field workers. We find that there is convincing evidence that such a conclusion would be false.