In a style which is as stark as the local mud houses, Dick Wittenberg describes ten years of Dickisoni’s bare existence, a typical village in Malawi, the poorest country in the world. Photographer Jan Banning portrays the inhabitants’ in their huts, with attention devoted to details. He did this ten years ago, in 2005 and he has done it again in 2015.
‘Poverty has been by far the biggest and most widespread evil of mankind’, the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote. Poverty is also mankind’s most underestimated and neglected emergency situation.
Those who live in prosperity think they know what poverty is. They truly have no idea. They only need to look back. People are born into poverty. Poverty has been a persistent part and feature of mankind since its inception two hundred thousand years ago. That easily encompasses five thousand generations. A century ago authors like Knut Hamsun, Herman Heijermans, George Orwell and Jack London were still writing novels about poverty in Western Europe. The average income in Western Europe was barely higher than in Africa two hundred years ago.
Half of the world’s population was still living in extreme poverty in 1980. Prosperity is the exception. Prosperity is not normal. Those who live in prosperity will find it easier to recall times of war than the horrors of poverty which they escaped. They have no knowledge of their great-great-grandfather on the peat moor who succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of thirty four.
Fortress Europe isn’t just closing its borders and eyes, it’s also banishing it from memory. Those who live in poverty don’t talk about what it’s like themselves. Their poverty also extends to skills and contacts. They exist, but nobody hears them, nobody sees them. They have no voice and no face.
BOOK
The Face of Poverty
Photographs by Jan Banning
Ipso Facto Publishers
Hard cover
232 pages
September 2015
ISBN 9789077386163
€24-99
http://www.if-publishers.com
http://www.janbanning.com
