Access Denied! Photo

Photographer’s Note

Stop! No entry admitted!

The sign, the fence, the barbed wire. I thought it could make an excellent symbolic photograph. Maybe the light could have been more on my side, but a contrast mask lifted shadows a bit for me.

The sign says something like "Unauthorized [people] are not allowed in the factory area".

I mused a bit over the word for word translation, it shows how differently languages are built, something that might not be very apparent to pleople who only know one language. Word for word, the black text goes "Unauthorized own not access to factoryarea". Sounds like horribly bad grammar in English, but in Swedish it is absolutely correct. Swedish and English are still quite closely related, compared to some other languages. If you know any Thai person for example, ask him or her how they handle plural in their language, it is quite interesting. :o)

guyfortier, guyfortier has marked this note useful

Critiques | Translate

Ebbe (9571) 2004-04-16 17:22

Nice symbolism with sign and barbed wire thanks to your low angle. Those signs have looked the same since I was a kid in the 60´s and took my first steps in the construction industry as an "unauthorized" At the age of eight I played with my friend one day and my jeans were ruined by some clay that my mother couldn´t wash of. I never told her that it was concrete.

But it is funny that they still use the sign with a police uniform that were put out of service in the late sixties. And the Swedish in that text is not normal today, it is formal authority language used fifty years ago. So those signs are almost a joke in themselves.