The photograph I have chosen is showing a man standing in the peril effects of a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. He is standing with his hands gesturing outwards from his side with a grimace look at the photographer taking the photograph of him. His gesture is implicating a sense of desperation and sorrow as the reflecting rubble surrounding him does as well. The black man is also wearing a shirt with a picture of Barack Obama. This evidently shows his affection for the achievement of a fellow person of color in a primarily Eurocentric society. However, even though he is proudly wearing such a political symbol it is somewhat ironic that he is looking for help in such devastation while shrugging the American photographer. This connotes a feeling of betrayal as you see no one attempting to pick up the debris left behind. Barthes states in his essay, The photographic message, “Connotation is not necessarily immediately graspable at the level of the message itself, but it can already be inferred from certain phenomena which occur at the levels of the production and reception of the message.” This photograph represents destruction at its most pivotal moment and cannot be explained with words rather lived only through being in that exact place at that exact time.

Ideally, in the general sense of the term, there would be rescue workers seen in this photograph as soon as the disaster struck. Although the light in this photograph is natural sunlight, the subject is in the shadow with a small portion of light on his face and has a depressing look since his black skin correlates to the disaster that is lit up behind him. The shadow makes him look even darker than normal which intensifies the tragedy. Even Obama who is black has a lighter skin tone that is the only sense of hope in this picture at all. There is a clash of connotations with the American flag behind Obama on the shirt symbolizing freedom and hope with the intense light of the sun on the debris representing tragedy. However, it is not neglect on the part of America that debris still lie in the streets of Haiti. As a matter of fact, American rescue workers from the Red Cross started showing up just days after the catastrophe. Therefore, the oxymoronic Obama shirt symbolizing freedom and equality coupled with the devastated subject in this photograph is not so much paradoxical.

According to Dyer’s essay The light of the world he states that, “People who are not white can and are lit to be individualized, arranged hierarchically and kept separate from their environment. But this is only to indicate the triumph of white culture and its readiness to allow some people in, some non-white people to be in this sense white.” Although, Obama is a black man he is considered to be in a cultural sense white due to his light complexion and proper dialect. In every sense of the photograph one could only imagine that if the subject were a white person there more than likely would be a rescue worker in this photograph. Otherwise, the connotations would be markedly publicized that a white person wearing an Obama shirt is left alone in the rubble with a newly black President. Again, the description of this photograph cannot be as precise as the actuality of the subject juxtaposed with debris gesturing a protest to the photographer. He has not had such a situation occur in his lifetime most likely. It certainly has not happened in my lifetime. For that reason this photograph is unique and possesses a visceral aspect to it that will never be translated to reasonable thinking.