Economy

image: Occupations (school teacher) ink print, 5x7

 

Artists Statement

I have been wrestling with artistic means of addressing the built-in confusion of our economic system. Our marketplace establishes price, which equates to worth and is a representation of value. While more conservative approaches to economy advocate little or no interference with the marketplace, it is my contention that the system fails completely to reflect the values of the society that it serves.
My latest project tries to explicitly and poetically represent this disconnect. To compare the values stated by the marketplace and the society, I selected 10 professions. I then looked at an informal survey of incomes conducted by New York magazine and contrasted it with an informal survey of 50 acquaintances about the value of those same professions to society.

The contrast in the values assigned to professions by the market and by individual members of society in my sample is marked. For the project's photographic component, I included the locations at which these professions happen in our society—specifically and down to earth—in my own neighborhood, with the hope of putting each profession and its relative value into clearer perspective. These photographs also follow a thread of work over the past several years on the urban environment and buildings as landscape.