PHOTO OF THE WEEK (#1): May 16-23, 2008
Moving the man, Uptown (upper Broadway Street), Chicago, 1969
I have moving on my mind. I don’t do it often. When I do it is a reincarnation for the better or worse. I am about to do it. In so doing, I came up with this image from the boyhood of my life as a photographer. One of the very first. I still like the street puns.
What in the world, one might ask, does this have to do with the “Border.”
Well, as it turns out, I shot this on the day that I began my project on Appalacians from Kentucky and Tennesee that had migrated to Chicago. I didn’t know, at the time, the issue was borders, migrations, economic geography -but it was. I just knew that the people I was about to do my first photo project with didn’t speak the language of the city they had come to, were not accepted as equals in the city they had come to and that their labor was financially exploited with no recourse.
Little did I know, on this day, in November 1969, that those were the issues that I would spend a career struggling with.
This was dawn, before I knew too much.
