Responses:
People in lines: seeming to converge, in secession, short people, tall people, men, women. Disorienting composition: Bodies without heads, no ceiling, no ground, no beginning of line, no end of line. Clothing and accessories: suit jackets, street jackets, casual jackets, purses, pockets, embroidered pockets. Body language: shrugged shoulders, hands in pockets, fisted hand, uneven weight distribution, folded arms. Part of a side of a mans face, looking forward. Representation within body language: bored, impatient, frustrated, anxious. Symbolic representation: Blue shirt; blue collar worker. Pin-stripped suit with white collar; white collar worker. Purses; women. Perspective; eye level looking down.
We're standing in a line somewhere, behind several men and women in suits. To our right and directly in front of us is an older, bald man in a pin-stripped suit and white, collared shirt. He seems to be starring ahead, like us, at the other people in line. A raising fist, of a man a few people ahead of us, is captured mid gesture. Maybe he's about to scratch his ear, or give someone a fisted hand greeting, or attempting to compress a lump of coal into a diamond while dancing robotically; it's hard to say. A man directly in front of him in a blue, button-up shirt and gray slacks, seems to be fidgeting with something in his pocket. Ahead of him is a person with a gold embroidered design on the back pocket of their denim pants, an abstract s-shaped, squiggly-line, ending in a spiral, which resembles the number nine. Another line of people in suits seems to be converging into our line to the left. Again to the right, and visible a few people in front of us is a monochromatic woman, red hair, peach suit and matching purse. She seems to have her arms crossed, by the way her shoulders are positioned and her head tilted to the right, maybe trying to look over the shoulder of the tall man in a dark gray windbreaker, directly in front of her. An extremely short woman in a black parca-type jacket and black purse stands in front of the tall man. There are about ten people in this image, standing in two lines, seemingly impatient and bored. Where is this line going? It's quite disorienting, there is seemingly no end to the line; by this I mean there is no beginning, the front of the line is obscured by people and there are is no counter, or door, or signs to denote a purpose for standing in this line. On top of this, there seems to be another line converging into ours, adding to this sense of disorder and purposelessness.
This is an interesting image to find in reference to "unemployment" for its symbolic content. In searching with this word, I found many images of people, with distressed and blank expressions on their faces standing in long lines at, implied, government agencies. The emotional content relates personally, whereas the lines are representational of amount of people affected and bureaucracy. Here we have only body language, clothing, accessories, and gestures to piece together what the photographer may be implying with this image in reference to unemployment. If we take the blue and white collar shirts to be symbolic references to social economic classes, the fist to be representational of being hit, and the emphasis on purses and pockets to represent money, then one way to read this image might be, that all social economic classes have been hit financially by the poor economy, therefore needing unemployment- a disorienting and disembodying experience which has no end in sight (?). Depressing. The upside is, this could be a picture of the lunch line in any metropolitan area; or it helps to add to the title, making it "Unemployment Benefits Extended".
