Unequal World

Photographers Capture the Gap Between the Rich and the Poor

The story of inequality is impossible to ignore these days. While we may think we understand wealth through television and tabloids, what we see represents only a drop in the bucket.

The book 1% Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality features 50 images from different photographers that show vast class disparities around the world.

 

Residents dig through a trash dump in Beaufort West, South Africa. The photo quietly suggests the contrast between the un-pictured people who created the waste and those who must survive by digging through it.

Photograph by Mikhael Subotzky

 

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Maids prepare a guestroom in a wealthy home in Kenya. The image is part of a photo essay called "Silent Lives," which profiles domestic workers in the country.

Photograph by Guillaume Bonn 

A man floats in a swimming pool atop Singapore's Marina Bay Sands Hotel, the city's financial district looming behind him. Little says that Singapore is a "tax haven"—a place "where it’s legal for major corporations to hide their money from the tax man."

Photograph by Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti, Institute

A man collects scraps to sell in the dilapidated Packard Motor Car Company plant in Detroit, Michigan. Before the collapse of Detroit's manufacturing sector, a person like him might have been able to find work here as an employee, rather than as a scavenger.

Photograph by Andrew Moore, courtesy the artist and Yancey Richadrson Gakkery

This gated community in Henderson, Nevada, shows "the environmental effects of our consumption and of our privileged lifestyles," Little says. You can create an oasis in the desert "if you add a tremendous amount of money and chemicals and water."

Photograph by Michael Light 

The image of a Chrysler 300 being assembled "speaks to pressures on the middle class," Little says. "You're seeing sparks and a robot and a fancy new car, but what you're not seeing is humans."

Photograph by Floto+Warner 

Dilapidated and demolished buildings sit before high-rises in Shanghai, China, a country in which inequality is increasing.

Photograph by Greg Girard

A store advertises its going-out-of-business sale. "This is another image that, to me, speaks about the pressures of the middle class," Little says. "The sadness of being of a hardworking family who is playing by the rules but who still can't make it."

Photograph by Mitch Epstein

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