viz.

Stefen Chow, The Poverty Line

Earlier this week, I tweeted about Stefen Chow's The Poverty Line, a collection of photographs that documents what an individual can buy with a daily wage of 3.28 yuan (49 cents), and here I want to draw more attention to this project and another like it. In documenting the choices one might face with this daily wage (significantly below the World Bank's poverty line, $1.25/day), Chow dramatizes the plight of the poor while staying within the language of economics and exchange.

Chow's photos are less sentimental than many documentary projects that focus on poverty; there are no crying children or hardened, starving adults. By constructing the viewer as the person confronted with this meager harvest, however, these photos do ask that we consider the daily frustration of making life or death decisions about how to handle limited resources. By making the limits of these funds visible, Chow also makes them real for viewers who might not be able to conceive of what living on 49 cents a day in China would look like.

A similar project by Jonathan Blaustein has a different origin and different rhetorical effects. The Lens blog on the New York Times website reports that Blaustein's The Value of a Dollar began when he realized that both the single and the double cheeseburger cost a dollar at his local fast food joint. The resulting project is a meditation on food as a commodity with a constructed value. The quantities represented are about what you would expect; Blaustein was able to purchase very few organic, early season blueberries and a lot of potted meat, ramen, and white bread, thereby supporting the thesis that it is often cheaper to buy processed food (although, notably, he was able to get a lot of grapefruit).  

Jonathan  Blaustein, The Value of a Dollar

Perhaps most interesting about this project is the composition; the photos set up the food items without packaging and isolated, with a white background, as if presenting them as art objects. Here, Blaustein's project differs most noticeably from Chow's. Where Chow places food on a newspaper and the viewer above, emphasizing the quotidian nature of this dilemma and allowing for easy comparisons between one food item and another, Blaustein plays with scale, sometimes making it difficult to ascertain how much of, for example, a Burger King side salad one can buy for a dollar.

While both artists ask their viewers to consider food as a commodity, their requests take strikingly different forms. In a pedagogical context, these images might be useful for discussing visual rhetoric and illustrating the argumentative different that subtle changes can make.