Sarah Kendzior, in her book of essays, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America, claims that economic crisis is the new normal.
poverty
Posted inArt
Photographs of Poverty Measure Broken Systems and Lives
Eugene Richards’s Below the Line: Living Poor in America isn’t about sympathy but something more.
Posted inArt
A Photographer Instagrams the Poorest Places in the US
This past summer photographer Matt Black covered 18,000 miles of the poorest places in the United States.
Posted inArt
From Droughts to Pollution, a Photography Award Documents World’s Environmental Crisis
Try to reconcile these numbers: one billion people go to bed hungry every night, yet Americans and Europeans throw away half of all food they purchase uneaten.
Posted inOpinion
Photos from the Margins of Chinese Cities
LOS ANGELES — One thing many Americans notice about first-tier Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai is that there are very few homeless people. Indeed, life on the margins in major Chinese cities often means life literally on the margins, away from the public eye.
Posted inArt
Trick or Treat in the Manila Slums
MANILA, Philippines — The film opens casually enough. Children wearing Halloween masks float, or roll, backwards. As we pay attention to the surroundings, we realize we are following the children through the poorest conditions, which shoot past us. Over time, we realize we are on railway tracks, and the children are on a cart. People pop in and out of frame, and the kids with Halloween masks continue to stare at us.
Posted inArt
Notes Toward A “Just” Image
Noted photography blogger Joerg Colberg has responded to my piece on the work of Shelby Lee Adams. Colberg states that “it would help us a bit to realize that our hand-wringing about these photographs ultimately won’t have any consequences – unless we spring into some sort of actual action.”
Posted inArt
Capitalist Realism or Poverty Porn?
For more than three decades, Shelby Lee Adams has photographed families living the Appalachian hollers of Kentucky. Adams sees himself as a documentarian and observing participant in the communities he works in, developing close friendships with his subjects and allowing them to shape his photographic practice. But is his kind of practice truly documentarian or is it exploitation?
Posted inArt
After the Financial Collapse, Help Support a Fascinating New Photo Project
While the visual associations with Jacob Riis’s famous series How the Other Half Lives are inevitable, artist Robyn Hasty ambitious new photo essay using the wet-plate collodion process is very very different. Titled “Homeland,” Hasty’s current project aims to document grassroots efforts to rebuild and re-envision life after the collapse of the American economy a few years ago.
Don’t expect this series to be an exploration of poverty as the young artist sees great social potential in these American visionaries that live in cities, farms, and almost anywhere you can imagine.