When photographer Peter Menzel’s work was exhibited in France recently, many viewers committed the museumgoer’s cardinal sin. He’d take it as a compliment if Chicagoans are similarly tempted during the year-long run of his show, “Material World,” at O’Hare Airport’s international terminal
There were fingerprints all over the photographs,” Menzel told me over breakfast in Chicago recently.
“The French would reach out to touch household objects in the photos, as if inventorying them, comparing their lives with other families around the world. We were hoping for that.”
Subtitled “A Global Family Portrait,” Menzel’s exhibition looks like a cross between that photographic classic “Family of Man” and outtakes from TV’s “Supermarket Sweep.” During the course of a year, Menzel and an international team of photographers traveled to 30 countries, making family portraits–with a twist.
Each family was photographed with virtually all its worldly possessions lined up in front of its home, as if sheriff’s bailiffs had just executed an eviction notice. The results were published as a book by the Sierra Club two years ago.
Besides their photographic talents, Menzel’s teammates must have the persuasive skills of a used car salesman. An Israeli family was conned or cajoled into being loaded–along with couches, tables and chairs, etc.–onto an open platform, which a construction crane lifted high above the streets of Tel Aviv.
And what possessed the Abdullas of Kuwait City to agree to represent the nouveaux riches of the Earth? On the sands in front of their home, they lined up their four automobiles (a Mazda, Mitsubishi, Honda and Mercedes-Benz) and a 45-foot-long sectional sofa. The Abdullas recognize they’ve come a long way from the simple lifestyle of their nomadic ancestors.
“The desert has become a parking lot,” the father of the family observed to the visiting photographers.
Explaining his project’s origin, Menzel–who spent a quarter of a century circling the globe as a free-lance photographer for National Geographic and Life, Paris Match and Geo–said it dawned on him that the peoples of the world are united in mutual ignorance: We simply have no idea how other folks live.
That realization wasn’t a product of Menzel’s more dramatic assignments, such as photographing the burning oil wells of Kuwait or the starving inhabitants of Somalia.
“It came to me in a flash during the world-wide merchandising campaign for Madonna’s book about her sexual fantasies,” Menzel said. “It struck me that, with the pervasive influence of modern media, people can be manipulated into thinking they know a rock star or a movie actress, artificially created personalities. Real people remain invisible.”
The electronic underpinning that makes such massaging of reality possible was revealed in interviews Menzel’s photographers conducted with their subjects. Asked to name their most valued possession, families in Albania and Iraq replied: our TV set. Mexican family members embraced their television as a cameraman snapped their picture. A family of Chinese fishermen loaded their TV into a fishing skiff for a waterborne portrait.
After “Material World” appeared, Menzel realized there was an inaccuracy in some of the lists of his subjects’ household objects. In a very real sense, many women are possessions, at their husbands’ beck and call 24 hours a day. Asked if her husband helped out around the house, a Japanese mother of two young children replied: “He does nothing but go out to buy the food for the dog.”
That subject–how women’s work is never done–is documented in Menzel’s new book, “Women in the Material World,” which combines photographs with interviews by journalist Faith D’Aluisio, to be published by Sierra Club Books in September.
Worlds apart
Conceptually, “Material World” belongs to a genre of what might be called guilt-inducing coffee-table books. Each portrait is accompanied by economic data, showing how that country ranks in terms of affluence among the family of nations. Those statistical charts include a category of wishes for the future; a German family wanted a country home, while the Ethiopian family hoped for a second set of clothes.
Evidently Menzel didn’t trust readers to recognize, from the stunning photographs themselves, that the West enjoys a near monopoly of the world’s riches. My moral reflexes, though, refuse to perform the mea culpa confession of undue prosperity programmed into Menzel’s project.
His own data undercuts the Noble Savage philosophy that informs his art. From Voltaire to Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals have comforted themselves with the thought that primitive cultures might provide an alternative model to the decadent materialism of Europe and America. Yet asked what she most wanted, a woman in Thailand (affluence ranking of 87th) replied: “Gold.” She explained to the interviewer: “Having possessions makes the family proud.”
As one leafs through “Material World,” it is not the gulf between Western affluence and Third World poverty that leaves the greatest impression. It’s more striking to see how the limited possessions of poor families tend to be instruments of doing. Affluent homes are filled with objects of passive contemplation. In Cuba, Argentina, China and Russia, Menzel’s subjects had sewing machines to tailor and repair the family’s clothing.
The American family owned one too. But it was an antique foot-treadle machine, a decorative souvenir of a homespun lifestyle long passe when the Skeen family moved to the suburbs of Houston.
The American way
To my eye, Menzel’s project demonstrates that, if anything, Americans are rapidly losing the materialist impulse. Greed and a sense of possession are two different mentalities. In this country, we presently have lots of the former, little of the latter. We acquire many things, but rarely take psychological possession of them.
Consider all those women’s handbags and men’s ties covered with an endless repeat of some fashion designer’s initials. If we truly invested something of our individual personalities in our possessions, wouldn’t we want them to carry our initials, not some stranger’s?
In Mali, Menzel photographed a family with precious little to its name. Yet the Natomo beam proudly at their few possessions, as if those chipped pottery bowls and dented cane baskets were themselves old and honored members of the family.
Once, an American family portrait might have had the same quality.
For instance, I can’t remember my mother’s kitchen table ever being replaced by a newer model, despite how shopworn it would look to contemporary eyes. Decade after decade, it accumulated nicks and scratches that weren’t considered imperfections but rather a kind of topographical map of family history.
My mother would wet a finger, rub one of those dents, and say, “Thanksgiving” or “Passover,” recalling their occasion.
When someone was about to buy a car, the men of our family would gather around that kitchen table for wonderfully pig-headed debates of Detroit’s products. These were occasions of state with an unvarying, shirtless dress code: My uncle Bill favored sleeveless undershirts. Summer or winter, my Uncle Harry preferred suspenders criss-crossed over long underwear tops.
Someone would say, “That new Studebaker, that’s the car of the future.”
Another would counter, “Give me a Buick; it’s got a solid feel.”
I can’t imagine such discussions today. It’s hard to have strong feelings about lookalikes. American cars now share the same nondescript lines, as if they all were designed by a student draftsman learning to use the French curve.
Standardized tastes
That visual sameness is, in fact, the hallmark of our material culture. Rich or poor, teenagers are likely to have a Walkman plugged into their ears, Nikes or similarly overpriced gym shoes on their feet.
Just as their predecessors perfected the mass production of identical products, today’s captains of industry have conditioned a generation of consumers with standardized tastes. The economic advantages are obvious: It’s not necessary to stock alternative models now that we all want the same thing.
Or rather, the same succession of objects. In a merchandiser’s dream, Americans now believe that new is automatically better than old. The thick-tired Schwinn bicycles of my youth were made declasse by the 10-speed, an anorexic piece of pipe work with a shifting mechanism only a professional racer could master. Now it’s being shoved into planned obsolescence by the mountain bike, a Lazarus-like recreation of a 1950s heavyweight bicycle.
With the computer, this new kinetic culture has reached its apogee. On purchasing the newest wonder chip machine, my computer-maven friends joyfully boast that it will be obsolete as soon as they get it out of the packing box.
So when you despair of our brave-new-world of ever-changing sameness, take a look at “Material World.” It’s a good exercise for children too.
Look closely at those families from Uzbekistan and Bhutan taking pride in their few possessions. In your mind’s eye, you just might see a picture that’s not there: A family portrait of an older America, where uncles in undershirts gathered around dented kitchen tables, each trying to convince the other that his gas-guzzler was best.
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Photographs from “Material World” are hung in the departure lounge of O’Hare’s international terminal. Those who wish to see them (without purchasing a ticket to some exotic destination) should contact the Chicago Department of Aviation, which can make the exhibition available for group viewings. Phone: 312-894-2000.
