![]() Powell set about photographing ninety-nine Americans who owe money (she ended up with a few more, including herself, but started with that figure as a reference to the slogan “We are the ninety-nine per cent”) and asked them to handwrite accompanying text about how much they owe, and to whom. Powell, comes from a kind of transgressive mundaneness. People make, and spend, their own money, to paraphrase Marx (who knew a thing or two about debt, both personally and politically), but not under circumstances of their own making.įor all of these reasons, a good deal of the power in the new book “ The Debt Project: 99 Portraits Across America,” by the photographer Brittany M. Meanwhile, forty-five million people in the United States carry a collective total of 1.5 trillion dollars in student debt, a direct result of a punishing formula: since the eighties, college tuition has risen at four times the rate of inflation and eight times that of household income. ![]() More than half of all overdue debt on Americans’ credit reports is from medical bills-which, given the fundamental facts of human morbidity and mortality, can be neither avoided nor entirely planned for, especially in the absence of universal health insurance. (An exception is the President, who has boasted, “I’ve made a fortune by using debt.”) Like many other problems in America, debt is often a systemic dilemma for which individual solutions are expected-save more, cut up your credit cards, get a second or a third or a fourth job. ![]() Since shame accrues to debt as inexorably as interest, many people don’t like to talk about the topic, rendering it even less visible. A large sum of money owed can seem strangely incorporeal-it may weigh heavily while still feeling somehow abstract, unreal.
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