A television repairman looks at a circuit board while sitting at his workbench in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Photo © John Brown All Rights Reserved
In a September 26, 2006 interview that appeared on Jörg Colberg's Conscientious blog, America Photographer Chris Jordan remarked,
"When you stand back at a distance, consumerism can look pretty attractive all the nice shiny cars and houses and clothes and plasma TVs and so on. But when you get up close and look at our overworked dysfunctional families, the waste streams of our products, the wars our greed is fostering, worldwide environmental degradation, toxic metals in the breast milk of Eskimo women, birth defects in the children of the mothers who assemble our cell phones in China, and so on, then you start to see that our consumer lifestyle is not as pretty as it looked from further back."
SHOULD WE THROW THIS AWAY?
Once upon a time, long before BMWs, Microsoft, ipods and blogs, American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau pondered his own needs for basic items such as new clothes. Thoreau realized that he might want new clothes but before he bought them, he wanted to be sure that he couldn't make due with the clothes he already owned.
In the Western world when something stops working it's quickly added to the trash heap of excess. Jordan, says, "Of course Europeans are not perfect, and they still consume, but at half the level per capita that we do."
In the developing world most people take their items to a repair shop to get them fixed. Craftsmen who make or repair items by hand have for the most part vanished from the scene in America. On the contrary, one visiting Southeast Asia will see skilled people manufacturing and repairing items virtually everywhere.
Whether a man is fixing a flat motorcycle tire on a sidewalk in Phnom Penh, Cambodia or repairing a TV circuit board in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Southeast Asians aren't quite so anxious to give "their things" the old heave-ho.
Do people care about what Chris Jordan or I think about such topics? It's highly unlikely. So why do I blog abut such nonsense you ask?
To remind myself that I am part of the problem. Are you?
John Brown Photojournalist On LIGHTSTALKERS
My Mondo Library Photography
Photo © John Brown All Rights Reserved
In a September 26, 2006 interview that appeared on Jörg Colberg's Conscientious blog, America Photographer Chris Jordan remarked,
"When you stand back at a distance, consumerism can look pretty attractive all the nice shiny cars and houses and clothes and plasma TVs and so on. But when you get up close and look at our overworked dysfunctional families, the waste streams of our products, the wars our greed is fostering, worldwide environmental degradation, toxic metals in the breast milk of Eskimo women, birth defects in the children of the mothers who assemble our cell phones in China, and so on, then you start to see that our consumer lifestyle is not as pretty as it looked from further back."
SHOULD WE THROW THIS AWAY?
Once upon a time, long before BMWs, Microsoft, ipods and blogs, American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau pondered his own needs for basic items such as new clothes. Thoreau realized that he might want new clothes but before he bought them, he wanted to be sure that he couldn't make due with the clothes he already owned.
In the Western world when something stops working it's quickly added to the trash heap of excess. Jordan, says, "Of course Europeans are not perfect, and they still consume, but at half the level per capita that we do."
In the developing world most people take their items to a repair shop to get them fixed. Craftsmen who make or repair items by hand have for the most part vanished from the scene in America. On the contrary, one visiting Southeast Asia will see skilled people manufacturing and repairing items virtually everywhere.
Whether a man is fixing a flat motorcycle tire on a sidewalk in Phnom Penh, Cambodia or repairing a TV circuit board in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Southeast Asians aren't quite so anxious to give "their things" the old heave-ho.
Do people care about what Chris Jordan or I think about such topics? It's highly unlikely. So why do I blog abut such nonsense you ask?
To remind myself that I am part of the problem. Are you?
John Brown Photojournalist On LIGHTSTALKERS
My Mondo Library Photography
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