Every round of the Hey, Hot Shot! competition makes us aware of new photographic memes, but it is often surprising how different competitors choose to articulate and interpret a specific topic. This round, we saw a handful of entries where photographers set out to capture the current state of the economy, putting a visual on the nebulous effects of a crashing housing market, rising unemployment, failing banks, and suffering businesses. Contender Christopher Frot captures deadpan storefronts in France in his project Proximity Closure, Eve Morgenstern focuses on portraits of foreclosed houses in Detroit and Oakland in her project Foreclosure and Abandonment that are reminiscent of Becher-style uniformity, and Jenny Pfeiffer captures a more distant view of sparsely occupied neighborhoods in her series Tract Homes taken in Tracy, CA.
The series submitted this round are void of the people who created these spaces, now derelict, and this vacancy is present in other artistic series' made in recent periods like in Brian Ulrich's Stores That Are No More and Todd Hido's images of foreclosed homes' interiors. Each of these works captures a solemness in what's left, tracing a narrative along the lines of a house or the division between a clapboard and a storefront edge.
Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden has taken his journalistic eye into Detroit as well, capturing a more personal state of poverty with faces and names attached to the city's downfall. He shoots in black and white, going into run-down homes, shelters, and following the city's poor down the street with his camera. In his essays Detroit: The Troubled City and Foreclosures, he has created a throw-back collection of images that seem taken in another era.
He writes,
There is homelessness, job loss, economic difficulties, etc, etc, etc. In Detroit the problem is not only a subprime problem it's a problem of people who lost their jobs. And this has been going on for many years. So it's a much more serious situation. When I went to Detroit - even though I had known that the city was pretty desolate - I was amazed that a major city in America in 2009 can look like this.
Certain areas look like Berlin after World War II or like Beirut. Something is wrong here. Recently I have read books and articles and watched television shows on the foreclosure problem. How can you have a trillion dollar industry that's not regulated?
Blogs and news media have made their own efforts in aggregating a view of the economy: The New York Times recently launched a reader-submitted online album feature called Picturing the Economy that shows a collection of snapshots, like baby chickens reflecting one family's attempts to grow their own food, images of homes for sale, empty storefronts, penny-saving jars, and empty basketball courts. Individually, the photographs are unremarkable, but collectively, the interpretation of what is recessionary to the everyman strikes a louder cord about how no man is immune. Picture essays in the Boston Globe reflect another news angle, showing that no matter how global, the economy is a conceptually impossible topic to sum up in a handful of photos.
Whether approaching the visual side of the recession as a photojournalist, an artist, or a person with a camera-phone, the documentation and images are compelling of a period where a problem has become so visible, it is impossible to ignore. It prompts us to wonder what these areas -- Oakland, Detroit, Cleveland -- will look like in 5 years or 10 years or 50 years, and whether these areas and communities will be able to find a revival, or if these photographs are capturing the last remnants of these cities as we once knew them.