At first I wanted to find a photograph of real people to analyze, but as I search I didn’t find any that I connected with and felt like I could properly analyze. Then I started to go through WPA posters and I found mine (http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/nationalyouthadministration/nya-advertisement and http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/158) soon after. I thought it revealed a part of the Depression Era that we haven’t talked about yet, which is the children. We’ve mentioned them in class, but we haven’t talked about their role in the depression and on how they were working as well to help their families. I thought this poster embodies the willingness of the young kids who wanted to work and how they could contribute to the family at such a young age. I have a few historical questions that I’ve been asking. One of them is what was the role of children in the Great Depression? This poster helps answer that by calling for boys to come learn how to work, but what about the younger children who couldn’t work? What about the young girls who maybe wanted to work but weren’t being catered to like the young boys were? This poster doesn’t answer any of those questions but rather brought them to my attention. I think the glitching method would’ve been engaging if I had been able to make it with my own computer, but even without it I still felt like I was changing the image to make it my own. When I first watched the video about glitching I enjoyed how much fun they had with it and how every image was personal to them in a way and wanted to make one that had colors blocking the image 1. Then without even knowing what I was doing, I was able to glitch my image to have colors blocking the bottom half of the image. I felt like it allowed me to focus on only the top half and realize how important the image was to the poster. The picture is of a young, white, able bodied boy, which would be the ideal person that the National Youth Administration wanted in their programs. What led me to this analysis was not only the picture but also from the Introduction of Jennifer Ritterhouse’s book Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s because of how it talks about the racism that was still very much present 2. By bringing race and gender into the conversation I got a better idea of what employers were looking for, even though they could use any worker they could get. I know a lot of people were skeptical of this method and in some ways I am as well, but I feel like this project helped me understand how you can look at images differently from them being glitched. I don’t think it works for every picture, but for this one it helped me focus on who this ad was aimed at, which then answered some parts of my historical question.
- Youtube. “The Art of Glitch | Off Book | PBS Digital Studios”. Published August 9, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr0yiOyvas4
- Ritterhouse, Jennifer. “INTRODUCTION: The Same Journey, Writ Small, That the United States Was On.” In Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s, 1-19. CHAPEL HILL: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469630953_ritterhouse.4
