An Aesthetic of Poverty?

It's a little too late for me to be writing a full-blown essay on this tonight. But I was just flipping through a photo essay from the Washington Post titled: Recession in the Rust Belt and became disturbed by what seems to be a poverty aesthetic.

Update: This morning Emily West, a prof at U Mass, posted this Slate article on Levi's new "Go Forth" ad campaign and it's use of iconic Walt Whitman verse, and dramatic imagery such as; "children playing in run-down neighborhoods, an embattled business executive surrounded by an angry mob, and young people frolicking in blue jeans", to produce a feeling of "squalor and anxiety" paired with what you might call a pioneer spirit.

After setting the ominous tone, the spot goes on to portray youth in distressed jeans, carrying heroic signage. Slate's Seth Stevenson proposes that the ad "acts as a galvanizing call to generational action: Times may be tough, but we've been here before, and America's youth will not be broken." Yes, and the first action will be Googling Walt Whitman, the second, paying full price for a pair of 501s.

I am reminded of the kind of stuff Susan Sontag was writing just after September 11th. She described the war on terror as a metaphorical war, one that had no end and was used to justify xenophobia and insecurity. The images generated by 2001 and the subsequent war on terror, justified people's feelings of suspicion, and led to further images, which further justified suspicion and paranoia. An aesthetic of fear, and thus of war.

Or (and I am extemporizing here a bit so be generous) Vietnam, and how the imagery from that war shocked people into action but at the same time inspired a generation of vigilante movies set in tropical jungles and featuring scary pan-global communist devils.

In the photo essay that inspired this post, images of tumble-down factories that were either abandoned 40 years ago, or firebombed out of all recognition a week after filing for chapter 11 in November of 2009 (slide 4), lead the viewer to attach a nostalgia to the present crisis that should not be here.

This is not the depression of the phonograph factory going bust (see slide 2) or the soda shoppe at the corner shutting it's doors (see slide 11). This is a new crisis, and it's happening in the present. By aping the style of artists like Dorothea Lange the photo essay, and the Levi's ad both frame this recession as a problem that has already happened.

Frankly, I am not so interested in rose-colored glasses right now.