Hollywood Poverty

I have started to drift away from my original plan of using the pictures I took in India and combining them with new pictures. When I started this project, I was curious to find out what people at Denison thought of poverty as it was an uneasy topic for my to work with in the beginning. I came to find out that people thought of empty fridges, an egg crate with one egg left, dirty dishes, having basic cosmetics, etc. This was extremely interesting, as poverty in India would more closely related to disease, death, etc. I came to realize that poverty is about perspective. Therefore, I decided to capture the images of poverty that were described to me by my friends. As I was taking these pictures, I came to realize that poverty in America, does not mean having nothing, rather is about having very little. For example, one had a fridge, but does not have enough food to fill the fridge with, etc... To me it seemed like the kind of poverty many of my peers spoke of was poverty at a more glamorous level. Therefore, I decided to call this collection "Hollywood Poverty".

All of the pictures have a frame within a frame to create a distance from the viewer. Though we may be viewing the pictures with a little feeling of disgust and sadness. The viewer and I, need to feel a little distance from it. As though we are looking through another person's view or lens to experience these things. I wanted to create a feeling of entering someone else's shoes to understanding a fragment of what people living in poverty experience on a daily bases. I also want the viewer to understand that these pictures, though they may only be depicting poverty of money, I tried to make the viewer just feel a lack of something a feeling of emptiness. Which could depict poverty of knowledge or emotions, and other forms of poverty.