The magazine of the art-form of the photo-essay
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
August 2015 back issue
by Peter Kennard
We live in an alternate reality, an upside down world. The mainstream media feed us a steady drip of concocted
scandals, and this anaesthetic dulls us, keeps us passive. We consume stories about a celebrity’s ‘weight battle’ or
about a politician going off-message on Twitter.
Most people know something is wrong, that we are missing the real story. At the same time, we are confused.
Drowning in this morass of trivia, we feel disorientated. As I walk to my studio, corporate ownership of imagery has
slid off the billboards into every crack and crevice of public space. What’s on offer is a state of blissless ignorance,
intravenously delivered through one of our many screens. The real scandal that our gaze is carefully guided away
from – that we are flailing to grab – is the war, poverty and human misery, here and everywhere, that our governments
and corporations promote and get rich off. This book is about that scandal.
I have tried to conceptualise this scandal through the use of numbers – numbers that show how we have screwed up.
But the numbers in this book are not the usual ‘45%-off Selected Items In-Store’ or ‘Text 0871-617-0135 for a chance
to win an all-inclusive holiday to the Algarve’. The numbers in this book outline, instead, the 94 per cent of revenue the
British company BAE Systems reaped from selling military hardware in 2013, or the number of people (1,000,000,000
– one billion) around the world who live on less than a $1 per day.
These are numbers you won’t see in a shop front or commercial break. They don’t ramp up the ‘buying mood’.
The Imperial War Museum, London, is running a major
retrospective of Kennard’s work until May 2016.
On 6 August 1945, 140,000 people died when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
The US has 662 reported military bases around the world.
An estimated 500,000 people are killed by firearms each year.
In 2003, British company, BAE Systems’ revenue was $26.82 billion.
The estimated cost of the modernisation plan for the current nuclear arsenal, including life extension programmes for
nuclear weapons and procurement of new delivery systems, is $1 trillion.
World military expenditure in 2013 was $1.747 trillion. This represents 2.4 per cent of global gross domestic product
or $248 for each person alive today.
805 million people (or 1 in 9 humans on earth) do not have enough food to live a healthy life.
