Gazipur, Bangladesh. Joynul Alam, 47, washes himself at the end of a day’s work in the brickfields. Workers from across Bangladesh migrate to Gazipur for the five-month brick-making season that runs from December to April. Using primitive tools, and with little or no protective equipment, most suffer from respiratory and skin problems. (Photo: Khaled Hasan/The Other Hundred)
By now the figures, sobering as they are, have become familiar. We have been told them time and time again. More than ten percent of the world’s population lives on less than US$1 a day, and 80 percent on less than US$10. All around the world, billions of people go about living their lives on amounts insufficient to buy a single meal in developed countries.
What we aren’t told, however, is anything about what the lives of this vast majority of the world’s population are like. While every day brings newsstands and television programs full of in-depth features and admiring headlines about the world’s richest people, rarely is anything presented about what life is like for the average Jordanian, Bhutanese, Romanian or Peruvian. The extent of the media’s obsession with the rich was highlighted just the other day by the absurd, and widely covered, spat between Forbes magazine and Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal over whether the prince’s net worth was US$20 bn or US$29.6 bn.
Of course, whenever there is a famine, as there was in Somalia in 2011, the mainstream media leaps to attention, if only for a few weeks. The same was true for the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, or the tsunami that struck Indonesia and other countries in 2004.
These events are tragedies that rightly deserve our attention, but they are not indicative of what daily life is like for the global majority. With The Other Hundred, our counterpoint to the Forbes 100, Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index and similar rich lists, we would like to correct this skewed focus.
The implication of many of the rich lists and articles put out by the media is that being rich is the only way to succeed or live a life of meaning.
The Other Hundred is an open call to international photographers, journalists and members of the global community for photographs that will be collected in a photo-book aimed at taking readers on a visual journey into the lives of 100 extraordinary people from all over the world and revealing the stories behind the statistics.
A counterpoint to the endless rich-lists, The Other Hundred will provide a better understanding of the incredible range of people who make up our world and the lives they lead.
Cantemir, Moldova. Carolina, 11, calls her mother, Tanja, in Italy. Five years earlier, Tanja paid traffickers € 4,000 to transport her to Italy, where she earns € 850 a month working illegally as a personal care assistant for elderly people. Her three daughters, 12, ten, and seven when she left, first lived for three years on their own before being taken in by various families to whom Tanja sends money. (Photo: Andrea Diefenbach/The Other Hundred)
It is our belief that the media has all too often made poverty synonymous with suffering and helplessness. The reality, however, is that many of the people who seem poor relative to the world’s wealthiest individuals nevertheless lead lives of dignity, achievement and fulfillment.
We would like to tell their stories—the story of the teacher in a small Burmese village, working to provide education for the poor and a better life for her students, or the Ethiopian street-musician, whose music brings a moment of joy to passersby, as well as the farmer in Bhutan as he struggles to harvest his crop or the shipbuilder in Durham working to retrain as a mechanic.
To do so we have invited the participation of dozens of the world’s best photographers, and are currently in the midst of a worldwide open-call to anyone, everyone, regardless of experience.
Deadline for submission is April 1, 2013. Entries can be submitted via email or on Facebook. For more details, please visit The Other Hundred.
We absolutely do not want to gloss over or ignore the dire conditions many people live in. But we would like to give people a sense of what daily life is like for The Other Hundred, those people who aren’t rich, but who deserve to be understood rather than simply pitied. We would also like to acknowledge the reality that poverty is relative, and that millions of poor people live in the richest countries in the world, not all of them immigrants.
Nandao, Guizhou Province, China. Yang Fuxi, 48, prepares lunch for his wife, to whom he has been married for 20 years. Saving for their children’s education has been one of Yang and his wife’s main goals. The village school Yang attended as a boy, five minutes walk from his home, is now abandoned. Yang’s three children all live and attend school away from home, the eldest two at university, the youngest at boarding school. (Photo: Denise Yee/The Other Hundred)
The implication of many of the rich lists and articles put out by the media is that being rich is the only way to succeed or live a life of meaning.
It is our hope that The Other Hundred will show that not being rich is both normal and nothing to be ashamed of, and engage its audience by capturing both the struggles and the successes of the world’s other hundred.
Do you have a photo to send The Other Hundred? Send it, then describe it in COMMENTS.
