This photo shows many African-Americans queuing.
Their series extends from one edge in the photograph for the other recommending a long line. The men and women are using coats suggestive of the fashion during the early part of the twentieth century. It must also have been a cold working day in fall months or early spring in that they should put all their hands inside their pockets to keep warm. In the back is a big billboard describing an American friends and family comprising of any mother, father, two children and a dog. They are inside a car driving throughout the countryside.
Over the billboard are the words and phrases World’s Top Standards of Living and on the right in cursive, There’s No Way Just like the American Way. These words suggest to the viewer the affluence associated with an American way of life, specifically the regular American relatives. To belong to an American is the best place to maintain the world. The photographer is intending to point out however, what is strange between the two elements in the picture. The entire image advises a pictorial commentary about inequality in American society and the impression that the billboard advertises.
The highest specifications of living that the billboard ascribes is merely applicable to the white American. The traditional, grinning, healthy, nuclear family clashes sharply together with the pensive expressions on the faces of the people in the queue. The glowing billboard as well as the dark colors in the people’s clothing additional emphasize this point.
The viewer does not know very well what they were dropping in line for but from your fact that some are transporting bags and buckets, they are really probably queuing for meals rations. The specific situation regarding racial divisions is not as negative today when it was decades prior to or the period when the photo was considered. There are still a lot of poor people who fall in line in soups kitchens, to get food stamps, and short-term shelters, however they would be comprised of black and light Americans.
Billboard ads even though, have not changed. They even now promote the great way of life to entice consumers; still failing that American life only offers good things.
