BY: ALEX BROWN
According to Oxfam: “The combined wealth of the richest one per cent will overtake that of the other 99 per cent of people next year unless the current trend of rising inequality is checked.”
It’s one of the prominent socio-economic issues of the 21st century, a complex and devastating state of affairs with many left grappling for solutions that, in many ways, are out of their hands. Intending to shine a unique light on the issue, Myles Little curated the new photo-book, 1% Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality.
“The combined wealth of the richest one per cent will become more than that of the other 99 per cent of people in the next year.”
1% Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality contrasts the luxury of the one per cent lifestyle with the impacts and implications this lifestyle imposes on the rest of the global-community and environment.
Myles Little used Edward Steichen’s 1955, The Family of Man, exhibition as a framework for his project. Steichen’s project focused on the aspects of human life that are familiar to people of all cultures and areas of the world. It was meant to represent similarities in the human condition as seen through a multitude of diverse cultures and circumstances. Little’s project, by contrast, focuses on the extreme inequity that pervades the global-spectrum of human life.
Little focuses on the extreme inequality that fills the global-spectrum of human life.
Little specifically chose photographs that are not too in-your-face to avoid turning people off with trite clichés, but rather to capture the nuances of wealth-inequality. Naturally, some of the photos are more explicit—an isolated Ohio mansion propped up against the distant smokestacks of industry fading in from the background tells a familiar tale. Some photos, however, are more difficult to decipher—a row of burgundy Harvard University classroom chairs, for example.
What does it all mean? I suppose it depends on where you’re positioned in the socio-economic spectrum, and the vantage point you’re afforded.
Little’s photo series captures the subtleties of wealth-inequalities without being too in-your-face.
Curated and edited by Myles Little, with texts by Geoff Dyer, Myles Little, Joseph Stiglitz, and graphic design by Grafikanstalt, Julia Wagner.
Image sources: onepercentshow.com
