Focused Two-Page Primary Source Analysis

This picture attracted me at the first glance, the silent, lonely, and controversial feeling the picture gives out makes it difficult for me to move my eyes but to think about it. I found it as an illustration of the article “Moving people Changing places”, which basically talks about people’s changing self-recognition----identity when confront with different groups and communities or societies: the strong sense of identity of a person may either bond or segregate him from a certain group.

When I first saw the picture, my full attention was caught by the woman sitting in the center of the scene, because she is the most distinct and isolated figure among all the people around her. She is sitting quietly on one level of the marble steps mottled with gray flecks, which feels complicated and depressed to me. The woman is sitting on a black coat; on her left side were two bags and a cup of drink. Her arms wrapped about her knees and she is looking straight ahead. Moving my eyes to people sitting around her, I noticed that they are sitting near each other and seems quite crowded, there are children, men and women. Some looks like family and some looks like friends. Different from the women, people who are sitting behind, before and on her right all seems to have accompanies and doing something, some are eating and some are chatting with each other, with their bags and lunchboxes occupied and open. Then I moved my sight to her left side and I found some men who seem to have a more similar situation as the women. Firstly, there are three men sitting on the left, all of whom seem alone because they neither talk to other people nor have eye contact. Secondly, all of them hold a similar gesture as the woman: folding their arms across their chest and looking at a certain direction silently.

When I observed all the details of the picture, I diverged to the general pattern. First, the picture is taken on a cloudy day, with no sunshine, so the whole picture feels kind of gloomy to me. Second, most of the people sitting on the marble steps are facing in the same direction except some children and adults who are chatting. The most obvious and strange scene is the women’s location relative to others around her: although people are sitting crowdedly near each other, the woman seems to be segregated because there leaves a circle of space between her and the people around.

After observing this picture thoroughly, I raised several questions which I am quite curious about. The First and most important is: why is this woman isolated and separated from other people in location?  Secondly, why the three men on the left side of her who are as single and alone as her are more related to other people? Finally, who is this woman? How her identity affects her location in the picture?