Perspectives of Poverty

Having grown up in two poor countries -- Liberia and India -- it is always slightly disorienting to see pictures of people that visitors take of those places. The people always look shabby, weather-bitten and unhappy with life.

Of course, that's not really a true picture. On happiness surveys, India usually falls somewhere in the middle, similar to, say, Portugal. Liberia, with its recent civil war, is a poor place to go around people how happy they are, so it is unsurveyed.

Anyway, all this is to introduce you to a pretty interesting project ("Perspectives of Poverty") that takes "poverty" photographs of poor, rural people in exotic places and then asks those people to pose as their normal selves. On the left, for example, is a maize farmer from Malawi as he would appear in a typical poverty shot, while on the right is how he sees himself.