Globalization In Philadelphia Photoessay

(Option #3) 

The most challenging thing about this project was finding sources to back up the pictures I had taken; I started taking pictures before I found my sources, which was a bad idea. I should have looked up things in Philadelphia that were well documented and then taken pictures of them. I looked at the document on the moodle assignment page for the benchmark hyperlinked as topics and started brainstorming ideas of what pictures I could collect and what theme I wanted to portray through my pictures. I then thought about pictures would be the most convenient to retrieve after school or even during school if I had a free period. After I collected the ones that were close by the school I started thinking of other places in Center city that I could get to via trolley or short train ride and by my house that I could go and document as a sign

I took 10 pictures although there are only 9 posted because I couldn’t get the 10^th picture to upload and I was running out of time for my project. My favorite picture was the mansion. Not only because the Elkins Estate is beautiful and I’ve loved the architecture and elegance that the home has but also because I had to work very hard at finding history behind it. I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to use that picture because I hadn’t found anything worth using that I could connect back to my theme or globalization. After I found information about the Nun’s that lived there I really started to dig up lots of information. So this picture became my favorite because I worked the hardest at it and because I love the house, after finishing my connections for that picture I felt more accomplished than I did for any of the other pictures. Overall, I’m not sure if it’s less or more prevalent in places other than Philly because I didn’t look for links between globalization and those cities. However, having said that I think that there is a larger amount of people immigrating to other countries like Florida and California that might have more signs of globalization because there are larger cities than Philadelphia so it makes sense that within those places that there would be more signs. I think that for a moderately sized city I think that it’s pretty evident in this Philadelphia. There are lots of examples in the businesses, neighborhoods, restaurants and shops as well as in the universities; each of them show a different portion of globalization but it is pretty evenly conveyed in each section.

I learned a lot about how I work and about Philadelphia. I didn’t have a lot of trouble actually writing about the pictures connection to globalization because it was pretty evident if you understood the lessons that we were taught in class. I learned so much about Philadelphia; I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know. I’ve been to the liberty bell, constitution center, Chinatown; all of which are places that I’ve been too so many times and never even thought about the historical value of the landmarks. I always assumed that the majority of the landmarks were put there as a agreement or as a gift and most of them were but I never thought of them as globalization. Now that I do Philadelphia seems much more interesting and historically rich than ever before.