Peter Menzel
Photographer, Peter Menzel's book, Material World, goes far beyond the desparity of wealth around the globe. In documentary fashion, Menzel confronts the American consumer mentality with images of average families around the world. Global economics, environmentalism and social justice issues all come to the forefront in this collection of photographs.
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Peter Menzel:
Where did you get the idea for Material World?
PETER: Freelancing in Somalia during their civil war and in Kuwait right after the first Bush War, I had some rather intense experiences that made life in the U.S. seem rather shallow and superfluous. Previous to those eye-opening events, I had the displeasure of experiencing a twenty-year marriage end in divorce. Sitting in my office early one morning, listening to NPR, which is the way I like to start every day, I heard an amazing piece on the marketing of Madonna's autobiographic book called SEX. The book was a sensation in the U.S. The radio report ended with Madonna singing, "I am living in a material world and I am just a material girl," or something close. I thought it was spot on. We live in an idiotic capitalist self-indulgent society where the sex life of a pop star is more important than impending starvation, land mines and child soldiers in Africa, or more interesting than the world's biggest man-made natural disaster in oil fields of the Middle East.
Quite literally, it took about a minute to come up with the concept and title for Material World: dozens of statistically average families from every corner of the world take all their stuff outside of their house for a big portrait. This way, all of my fellow, greedy, shallow American neighbors could compare themselves to the rest of the world and see if they were really better off. I also got the idea for an interactive CD-ROM at the same time.
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