Opening the Pocket Doors: Everybody Has Those Days

Brooklyn Historical Society Staff, circa 1990. Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Records, ARC 288. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.

Have you ever felt like this at work? The real question is, what exactly is the person in the photograph feeling and expressing? Why was this photograph taken? To me, this photograph evokes extreme frustration, possibly having to do with their work or with their computer. But to different people, the picture could evoke different emotions, such as exhaustion or perhaps even pain from a headache. Unfortunately, we don’t have any more information than what we see in front of us. While it’s fun for us to write blog or social media posts about what we think could be happening in a photograph, we can’t make the same assumptions when describing a photograph for archival purposes. We include facts from provenance, metadata, or any other information provided by the maker or donor of an image. For example, we know that this image is of a woman at the Brooklyn Historical Society circa 1990 sitting in front of a computer. Unless anyone else has some sort of information that they can provide, we won’t know anything else about this image. In the meantime, we can have fun speculating about the image. What does this photograph convey to you? 

The Brooklyn Historical Society Institutional Archive Project is generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH's collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We welcome appointments to research our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.