Thoughts

The NYPL Photo Collection

My mom sent me a link to a post on the NYPL Blog about their Photo Collection, specifically trying to demonstrate the ways in which it was a more intriguing, and possibly better resource than Google’s image search. I’ve long been a fan of the Photo Collection, from which I’ve pulled more than one image that I’ve used on this site. So I thought I’d pull another, as a nod of agreement to the blog post. My search term was “outsider.”

The above is Image #1259993 from the Collection. According to the site, it depicts: “Carpenters and construction workers waiting outside Florida State employment office trying to get jobs on Camp Blanding… [White and African American carpenters and construction work…] (December 1940)”

Clearly the NYPL search function didn’t understand the fraught and often problematic meanings of “outsider.” Nevertheless, it’s an intriguing image.

By Alexis

Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, premiered in the fall of 2019 in New York City and has since screened around the US and internationally. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. Her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. In addition to her writing and filmmaking, she is currently serving on the Executive Board of CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), as a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and a co-founder of Little Rainbows, a queer story time for children and their caretakers.

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