Road and Meetings

Meeting new people is an important aspect of our socializing. It helps us to know new people and to develop ourselves we can admit that it builds our life. Moreover, our life is also a road! A road of obstacles in which we can step on nails and which can be also easy and clean. During our life we chose many roads we could go. The documents under review are all related to road and meeting other people. Each of them casts a different light into the theme.

The first document is a photo of two people that are going to Los Angeles. The second document is also a photo, taken by Ian Guy, called " easy riders". It illustrates a group of bikers and gives us a vision of a huge passion to the motorcyclists. An other vision is given by the music of the third document

We may wonder how do the documents deal with and illustrate the theme of road and meeting.

First, let’s look at what the three documents have in common. After analysis, we can see that people like all discovery, adventure and travel. All of these are part of the road theme.

There is an opposition between the first document and the second and the third documents. The last two show bikers, who travel by motorcycles, whereas the two people in the first document are walking. I would like to admit the groups of bikers use the motorcycles and thus express their passion and pleasure in the road.

Now let’s talk about their destination. The bikers in the third document don’t know where they are going and that the two men in the document 1 are walking towards Los Angeles. The title of the photo (“towards Los Angeles”) gives us this information. We can make two hypotheses about the poster of document 2. Maybe they know where they are going because they are driving in the same direction; or maybe the group of people just wants to stay in a group to exercise their passion. It is this second hypothesis that seems to us being the most real.

Somehow two friends have an exact arrival point, groups of men know neither their direction nor their goal.

This brings us to the theme of the meeting by studying the contrast between the first document and the other two, concerning their number of members. In Doretha Lange’s photograph (Document 1) the men are only two, whereas in Ian Guy’s poster they are many more, as in Steppenwolf’s song where it is difficult to imagine that there are only two, because the passion for motorcycles is often shared in a group. But whether they are in pairs, or wherever they are more, this situation seems to satisfy them because they share the same interests or the same destination.

They are groups who travel and therefore have the same ideas: they either have a common direction (doc 1) or the idea of driving together to find out their destination. However, there is no dialogue in any of the documents, which at first sight seems contrary to the representation of the meetings (which are made of communication) that we have. After analysis, we can deduce that they have spoken before, since they have the same ideas.

To sum up, road and meeting are everywhere in each of the documents but there are several ways to contrast these two main themes (with the means of transport, the direction , the size of their group or their words).

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