North Front of Agricultural Building, World's Columbian Exposition 1894

Editor: This is "North Front of Agricultural Building, World's Columbian Exposition" by William Henry Jackson. It's a photograph, and the scale of the building is impressive! What strikes you about this image? Curator: It's a testament to the utopian ideals, however problematic, that fueled the fair. The building represents a manufactured, idealized vision of agriculture, obscuring the realities of labor and land exploitation during that period. What does it tell us about whose stories were being told, and whose were being left out? Editor: That's a powerful perspective. I hadn’t considered the narrative it omits. Curator: Exactly. Analyzing these gaps helps us understand the social and political climate that produced such grand, yet exclusionary, spectacles. Editor: I'll definitely keep that in mind. Thanks for the insight! Curator: Of course! Thinking critically about what isn't shown is often just as important as what is.