Untitled 1908

This photograph was taken by Lewis Hine. The dominant visual symbol is the wooden fence and the dark clad man walking past it. Gates and fences have long served as a powerful motif, marking boundaries between safety and danger, the known and the unknown. Think of the Garden of Eden, or even the gates to the underworld in ancient mythologies. Here, the fence is a liminal space, crossed by a worker. However, unlike the gates guarding paradise or hell, this man walks past, almost unnoticed, every day, to a smoke-filled factory in the distance. The fence, and this crossing of the fence, speaks to me of modern labor and the transition from the known to the unknown, from freedom to industrial production. It appears in many iterations across time, and each conveys this very notion. It's a motif, not a symbol, ever evolving through history as society changes around it. What will its future be?