Martha Rosler created a work in 1974-1975 titled "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" which used photographs and text to document and critique two systems for describing the Bowery neighborhood of New York City and its residents. The work presented a sequence of black and white photographs from the 1940s alongside descriptive text, seeking to analyze how these two media systems fell short in capturing the full reality of everyday life and the public sphere in the Bowery.