Bubley was born in Phillips, Wisconsin in 1921, the era of photojournalism. She became interested in photography early on in her life and she ended up studying it in a one-year program at the Minneapolis School of Design. Later on, she was hired by Life magazine where she was able to take free lance photographs. Bubley had the ability to be intimate with the viewers and she was able to create complex and compelling narratives with her photographs. Her work is of both cultural and artistic purposes, where it investigated the era’s American stereotypes that were elaborated with the pages of the magazine for which she has worked on.
In the “Colored Waiting Room”, Bubley focuses her entire photograph, with a sign, held in the mid-air with some wires. The sign is approximately one-third of the paper and it’s placed in the center, which became the focus of the photograph. The big giant black letters of “colored” covers most of the sign as compared to the tiny letters of “waiting room”, written on a black arrow, pointing to the left. This black and white piece is simple and it only consists of one object but it tells a powerful story of the hardships of African Americans in the post-Civil War.
Bubley is known to create intimacy with her subjects; this piece of work certainly captures’ the subjects’ interests and creates intimacy with her subjects. The people in that era have certainly seen one of those signs and are participants of the Jim Crow Laws. They might not support them but they still exist to separate people with two different colors of skin. The present subjects might not have seen these segregating signs before but they have certainly heard of the once racist United States and it still is under a certain degree. The African Americans are less discriminated now and it is now against the law but it still happens. It is not completely equal yet and it never will be, although many people have begun to accept that United States is trying to be equal in all aspects.
The Jim Crow Laws were used in the South, beginning in the 1880s to legalize segregation between the white and black people. It was created by a white minstrel performer called Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who saw a performer, with a face darkened with charcoal, sang “Jump Jim Crow.” After that, the word “Jim Crow” became a racial slur with the same definition as black, colored, or Negro. Eventually, at the end of the century, white people refer their acts and laws of discrimination as Jim Crow laws and practices. Railways and streetcars, public waiting rooms, restaurants, boardinghouses, theaters, and public parks were segregated; separate schools, hospitals, and other public institutions, generally of inferior quality, were designated for blacks.
After the Civil War and in the Reconstruction Period, all African Americans were supposed to be free and they were supposed to be treated equally. The South was in a state of turmoil in a social, political and economical sense and they seceded from the North during the war. In the Reconstruction Period, the North wanted to readmit those states but the South saw this reconstruction plan as a disgrace. They did not welcome these changes at all because all their farms and factories were ran by black people. They were their main source of labor. They were also afraid that the African Americans would cause a bloody revolt but instead, they were busy trying to survive, since they don’t have a job anymore. Many went back to their old job because they were unable to find another job.
Bubley’s photograph entails a great amount of history with a simple sign. The sign represents discrimination and illustrates the hardships that the African Americans had to endure before they gained their rights as a citizen. Just because of their skin color, they lacked the rights to be treated equally in this world. The white and black people should trade places and learn how it’s like to a black person for just one day. If they did that for just one day, they would realize how hard it was to be black. Imagine how much they hate having that skin color. Some were proud of it and weren’t ashamed of it but some definitely wanted to be white just to be treated with respect.
