Silhouette

As the sun yellows and dips behind the puffy clouds, swiped across the early evening sky, he sees his shadow, or rather his silhouette, just a simple black outline of the person he is, blocked out by the intense glow of the rays behind him. Unidentifiable.

Miami is a city with no identity. Of the three types of people who live here, locals, mobiles and exiles, they are either overlooked and hold no claim to the city or simply identity with a completely different place. Yes, it's true that all of them live under the same blistering sun every day, but their identities are lost within the city. Just by looking at them, you may not be able to tell where they come from or what language they speak which just goes to show how not one group is known to belong to the city. Sure, the locals call themselves just that, locals, but after the hard economic times in the middle of the 20th century, they were pushed to the dark corners of the city while the beautiful beaches were splattered with fancy condos and the fantastic influx of Cubans and other Latino people surged into the city. With this strange combination of people who all hold about equal thirds of the city, not just one can hold claim to the city.

But beside the picture just representing the lost identity of the people of Miami, I also thought it showed a little bit of the facade of the mobile culture and the way Miami is portrayed as a beach and party town because the sun is being reflected in the glass instead of directly at the sunset itself. This struck me as perhaps related to the way that magazines and TV show the beach and club scene of the city, which are truly there, but they are being used to create a fake identity of the city instead of the raw, true feeling of the city as a whole.