This is Roy Decarava's most known image, viewed by millions in Moma's Family of Man exhibition.
Without the two main subjects, the girl in the formal dress and the Chevrolet billboard, this would be a very conventionally framed photograph of an empty lot. This balance creates a solid stage for these two unrelated elements to interact. Our eye is first drawn to the figure in the striking dress, contrasting with its murky, unglamorous surroundings. The girl’s posture leads us to the advertisement, which because of the way it’s cropped into, weirdly maintains its original graphic hierarchy, which emphasizes the text. Had the entire frame of the billboard been included it would become more objectified and less communicative. This relationship between figure and ad copy is further strengthened by scale, the billboard being at a distance which makes the car in close proportion to the girl. A generation before, during the great depression, it was a photographic cliché to show looming advertisements above soup kitchen lines. Here a relationship is established that is more complex and open to interpretation.
"A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being."
Roy DeCarava
Conversations with Roy DeCarava trailer
