Jun 15, 2011
An unremarkable 1960 photograph with its absurdly analytical description
Shorpy posts this image with the following tongue-in-cheek caption…
In this work, the photographer presciently foreshadows the essential dialectic that was to become the touchstone of the nineteen sixties.
The polarities of the cultural rift that was to come is limned by the stark juxtaposition of iconic figures: one, a near-Kerouacian embodiment of the rejection of middle-class bourgeois values and mores, confronts his antithetical archetype, himself a veritable paradigm of conventional managerial-class affectations.
Note also the seemingly aleatory disposition of deceptively mundane objects: the “bullet” lamps, an allusion to the violence intrinsic to the enforcement of conformist societal imperatives; the desk with no legs, an unconscious admission of the illusory foundations of work-ethic mythologies. Most tellingly, a copy of the Declaration of Independence is inexorably detaching itself from the wall, an ironic metaphor for the impermanence of superficial obeisance to culturally-imposed eschatology.
The more I read this—which I can’t stop doing, for some reason—the more sense it’s starting to make.
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Sounds Lester Bangsesque..’swill merchant’ rants. I had to use my dictionary three times: presciently, mores,aleatory. I would love to see the cliff notes. Each paragraph a sentence? Anyone up to the challenge?
I was an English major in college and made it through by making up BS like this about literature I read (or didn’t read). However, this guy is a real pro. I could never aspire to such heights. This is a work of art (not so much the photo).
I was looking for the laptop on the desk.
clearly this is a college dorm room and the father of one of the roommate is interviewing the other student to make sure he is to be trusted with his son. Don’t let the smoking jacket and hat fool you, he’s a shark.