ThisICP Museum

Hello, all!

I thoroughly enjoyed our trip to the ICP museum. I have taken many history classes and as a pianist, I have been exposed to many art classes as well in the last few years. However, I have never had a more fulfilling experience in either subject than I did at the ICP museum. I thought it did a wonderful job at creating a story out of the photographs that were there. History can often be presented in very dry ways, I have come to learn over the years. However, the way the museum was structured was very interesting. There were lines of photographs hung on the wall, and we followed the photographs in a very specific way to create a story. I found this very interesting; I have visited several museums in my life, but this was the first time I was told upon entering that there is a specific way to go in order to attain a full understanding of the content in the building. I was told to follow a specific path and pay careful attention to each photograph on that path, in that order. I can honestly say this made my job as an observer both easier and harder at the same time: it became easier because there was no ambiguity. I usually feel very lost at museums, unsure of where to go and what to look at. I would usually just walk around to random works of art, stare for several seconds, and move on without another thought. However, my job was made much harder because now there was more pressure to pay attention to the story that was being told. I had to take good care to observe and analyze all the details presented in each photograph, on the first floor and downstairs in the basement. There was not a single photograph that seemed out of place. Everything there tied in with everything around it and the experience gave me a very real idea of the time periods represented, from the 1960s all the way up until the present.

The photographs at the museum were unlike anything I have seen before. Through techniques such as perspective and lighting, I could feel myself being put into the pictures themselves. They conveyed a wide range of emotions from picture to picture that helped me understand the time period and the discriminatory practices that were around for many years.

The photograph I chose to focus on was called “Sleeping quarters at miners’ hostel” by Leon Levsen, taken in 1946. Here is a brief description of the painting.

There is a small room that looks sort of like a jail cell or dungeon. Light is entering the room from windows that are high above on one of the walls. There are two lines of beds. In each, there is a row of bunk beds. Six men are visible in the picture. Five are sitting and one is standing up. Two of them are seated at a table located at the center of the room. There is a pail on the table, so perhaps they have just finished eating a meal. The man on the left appears to be staring off into the distance towards his right. The man on the right is knitting a white article of clothing. There are two men sitting opposite each other on opposite bottom bunks near the photographer on either side. They are both merely grasping one hand in the other. There is one mean standing at the back of the room, underneath the windows. He is wearing a beret and is staring straight ahead. The last man is in the bottom bunk on the back left corner of the room. He seems to be examining a bottle. He is the only man in the picture who is barefoot. The other men have on black shoes. The man who is knitting appears to be wearing deteriorating work boots. He also has on a beret. The man next to him is wearing untied high boots. The man on the bunk near the photographer on the left is wearing deteriorating dress shoes. All of the men appear to be wearing a towel or bedsheet-like article of clothing, except for the man wearing dress shoes. The room does not appear to be very clean, The floor has many stains of different colors and sizes. The sheets on each beds are thrown about without organization. All of the men have very stern expressions, though the man examining the bottle seems to be the least stoic. He seems extremely interested in the bottle. There are no decorations in the room. It appears to be all gray and white, at least what can be made out of it in the black and white photograph. The tiles on the walls are cemented and look like bricks.

This photograph moved me because it has a very ominous feeling to it. All of the details add some sense of darkness to it, from the stern expression on each man’s face to the disorganized room to the bed-sheet like clothing to the bottle, which may indicate that some of these men like to drown their sorrow through drinking.

All in all, I had a very enjoyable time at this exhibit and look forward to visiting it again sometime in the near future.