Martha Rosler - The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems

A while back, we had a lecture about Martha Rosler. An upper-class photographer in the 1960’s and 70’s. She used to go around to a place called The Bowery, a very low class and poor area of the city and photograph what she saw... But instead of photographing the people and the poverty, she photographed objects and scenes that represented them. She didn’t objectify the people, just what they did and where they did it





I found this lecture very interesting so i did a bit more digging and found out a bit more about the kinds of work Rosler had done and is doing now. A lot of it features women in the home and what i imagined was some sort of antifeminist message. Bringing The War Home originally said to me that Rosler’s views were that all women are housewives while the men go off to war... A very outdated view of society. I then decided that actually, it was nothing glamorous but actually a representation of something negative... And i was right.

These images were created at the peak of the US military engagement in Vietnam. The images are a response to her frustration with “the images we saw in the television and print media”.

Although the images were created to do with the fact she didn’t like to see the war in her front room, my point is that all of the images depict a woman in the household, something that isn’t common in our working society anymore.