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In 2010, more Americans
lived below the poverty line than at any time since 1959, when the U.S. Census
Bureau began collecting this data. Last January, TIME commissioned photographer
Joakim Eskildsen to capture the growing crisis, which now affects nearly 46.2
million Americans. Traveling to New York, California, Louisiana, South Dakota
and Georgia over seven months, Eskildsen's photographs of the many types of
people who face poverty appear in the new issue ofTIME.
Eskildsen, who last visited America in 1986, says the poverty crisis was a side
of the country he'd rarely seen in the media in Berlin, where he is based. "For
Europeans living outside of America, it's a mythical place because we're
breastfed with all those images of Coca-Cola and American culture,” Eskildsen
says. "It was very heartbreaking to see all kinds of people facing poverty
because many of these people were not only economically poor, but living in
unhealthy conditions overall.”
Eskildsenwas also surprised by how
pervasive poverty is in America. "Once you start digging, you realize people in
poverty are everywhere, and you can really go through your life without seeing
them before you yourself are standing in the food stamp line,” he says. "So
many people spoke about the disappointment of the American Dream—this, they said,
was the American Reality.” In the accompanying magazine story, Barbara Kiviat
argues that "there is no single archetype of America's poor,” and that
"understanding what poverty is in reality—and not in myth—is crucial” to
efforts to erase the situation. Perhaps equally as crucial is the effort to put
a face to the statistic, which Eskildsen has done here in haunting
detail.
Feifei Sun, reporter at TIME.
The project was done in collaboration with Natasha Del Toro, reporter for TIME.
Lightbox.TIME |
Photographs |
