#there's such an important theme of the loss of Innocence and what that entails

[annaofaza]

I'm fascinated that Vash, Knives, and Wolfwood don't know their birth families and how that plays out with their guardians.

Vash's philosophies are shaped by Rem; Knives rebels/reframes Rem's words to suit his own agenda ("There's so much we have to do to make sure it [Tesla's death by human experimentation/callousness] doesn't happen again." To me, it's a "I learned drinking at my father's knee" v. "I saw my father drinking and resolved not to be like him" relationship, and many people have written amazing metas on this!

Wolfwood has had two prominent guardians in his life—Melanie and Chapel (depending on which version, Chapel actually raised Wolfwood for a bit). It's pretty formative in that Wolfwood before the Eye of Michael is a caring individual but also hard-nosed to a certain degree (becoming a caretaker figure, knowing the orphanage is struggling, etc.), while Chapel teaches him that connections drag you down and that you must make an immediate decision (as the world/job is harsh and unforgiving). His experiences with Melanie and Chapel also shaped his self-sacrificing nature: to help with the greater good, whatever that means—but Wolfwood rebels against Chapel as Knives did with Rem, which (unlike Knives and Rem) is a good thing.

Again, none of these characters know their birth origins or express a lot of curiosity about finding out more, and that nature/nurture dynamic fascinates me because they're a) very much their own individuals but b) still burdened by who raised them.

It's a compelling theme in Trigun that it's not necessarily how you start out; it's the experience and guidances (or lack thereof) do. There are a lot of self-determination/fate interpretations among Vash, Knives, and Wolfwood—what path are you on? Did you create it? Is it shaped? Can you go without a path or make a different one? How does it all end? Can you truly escape where you came from? (More thoughts in the tags lol)

[lordkambe]

♠   title, type: mahogany, one-shot ( possible second part )

♠   character, fandom, type of reader: mori ogai, bungou stray dogs, woman reader

♠   genre, rating: y/n, slice of life / smut, nsfw 18+ readers only

♠   themes, triggers: somewhat public ( in mori’s office ), slight humiliation, “princess” is used as a pet name, dominant #vibes, mori is uwu shy

♠   brief summary:  y/n is an assassin for the black lizard and mori has taken an interest in her. after a non-important meeting mori calls y/n into his office separately. he confesses his interest in her but his teasing attitude makes things a little bit... frustrating for y/n ;)

♠   author’s note: hey, hello ! this is my first piece of writing i’m sharing and of course it’s a goddamn thirst trap. i hope you enjoy it. please be aware that i did “cut” this out of fear that it would be too long for a first writing piece. there’s more... spiciness to the story that i’d be more than happy to add if anyone ( literally anyone ) is interested !

Work is work and as long as it paid well, that’s all that mattered. There was no ulterior motive for joining the Port Mafia. It had nothing to do with your personal morals, it had to do with being able to survive in a city like Yokohama. You remember spending the early years of your childhood in the slums of the city, an orphanage wouldn’t even accept you; not with the abilities you possessed. The Port Mafia found you and you couldn’t think of a single reason to decline the generous offer.

Your position in the Port Mafia couldn’t be compared to that of an executive. You worked alongside the Black Lizard as an assassin and barely had time to create friendships with the business. As of late, you found yourself inside he office of the boss himself, Mori Ogai. The name itself held so much power within the Mafia and throughout the city he claimed to protect.

The meetings between the Black Lizard and Mori were always short almost as if he was calling these meetings on a whim. At each meeting you couldn’t help but to notice Mori’s fleeting glances. You always assumed he was polite enough to give you eye contact when he spoke but then today, your eyes locked and the two of you stood looking eye to eye. He was interested in you. The meeting ended, you broke eye contact, and began to head for the large door.

“Y/N.” His voice is... cute. He only spoke like that with his precious Elise-chan. Your figure returned to face him, “Is there anything wrong sir?” The timbre in your voice was firm, professional and contrasted deeply against his casual-flowery tone.

He blushed. “No. I just wanted to look at you.”

Now you blushed. You simply bowed before exiting the massive office in hopes that he didn’t catch the subtle change in your demeanor. You walk forward but your hand is still attached to the door. You engage in a mental debate over the events that just took place. It was Gin’s soft voice that brought you back to life but before you could join her and the rest of the Black Lizard the door behind you opened. It was Elise and she tugged at the end of your sleeve. You looked down to the blonde.

“Y/N, Rintaro is asking for you.” Elise skipped forward to stand with the rest of the Black Lizard. You looked at the group then at the door behind you. “It’s an order.” Elise chimed.

With your hands on your hips a puff of air left your lips. “Alright. Thank you Elise.”

Without much of a choice you reentered the room you left merely seconds ago. Mori stood at the end of the long wood table with his back facing the door. Your body tells you to move forward and you do. You stand close to the edge of the table it was lined with roses, candelabras, sweets, and toys. About three chairs down from Mori, you stop.

“You called for me boss?” Your voice is soft yet still hosts the same professionalism you always greeted Mori with.

Mori doesn’t look at you but you hear a soft chuckle. Now you’re riddled with confusion and anxiety settles in the pit of your stomach. “Boss, I say this with respect. If there isn’t anything of importance you need to say to me. I need to be on my way. The Black Lizard and myself...”

Before you can complete your sentence Mori turned to you. His cheeks were still the same hue of pink from your earlier conversation. The stern expression in your face softened but your brows did furrow in confusion.

“Y/N there’s no doubt that you’re the most beautiful member of the Port Mafia. With the confidence you exude you must know this.”

You’re at a loss for words, sure a pass was made at you here and there but you never considered yourself to be at the level at which Mori described you to be. In that moment your muscles relax and you feel as if you can speak to Mori as an acquaintance, not a boss.

“Oh... thank you.” You look away but can feel Mori’s gaze upon you. He took a step forward but you remained in your place. Come closer you thought, please. The space between you and Mori sewed together but still you couldn’t bring yourself to look at him.

“Interesting that the woman who makes me shy is feeling shy herself.” His gloved hand reached towards you and fell underneath your chin. He lifted it with such caution you could melt at the sweet touch.

“I’m sorry, boss.”

“Mori’s fine.” He encouraged.

“Mori.” you breathed.

In a blink of an eye your lips met his. The sweet, innocent kiss evolved into something deeper. Mori’s hand fell from your chin and down to your waist. His arms brought you in close and your body pressed against his. Your hands were attached to the back of his neck. Your fingers crawled upward to tangle them into the strands of his raven hair.

The kiss finally comes to an end but you’re hungry for more. Your hands cup his cheeks and you whine. He chuckled and as the sound left his lips you watched his eyes flicker. He led you to the head of the table and carelessly shoved the chair aside. You stood where the chair once rested and looked at Mori, your eyes just as eager as his.

Your lips crash together once more. “Y/N...” he whined now pulling away from the kiss to admire you. “I’ve been imagining this.” He says with his eyes taking in every inch of you.

“Imagining what?” You ask sheepishly. You wanted to hear his praises, you wanted to be admired by the most feared man in the city.

Mori lifted you just enough to help you be seated comfortably on the table. His hand traced up your chest signaling for you to lay flat on the table. Now with your back firm against the mahogany table the hand Mori had on your chest was placed on your neck.

“You.” He began. “On this table flat on your back as I... have my way with you.”

He’s shy, you remember. “Mori... you’ll have to be more specific otherwise I’m going to get back up.”

Just after those words left your lips the grip Mori had around your neck strengthened. “Oh, princess. Don’t say things so foolishly.” His thumb traced the bottom of your lip. “Open.” It was a demand and you complied.

His thumb was placed in your both and you teased it with your tongue. Excited to where things were headed you felt the heat between your legs grow. It seemed that Mori had gotten the memo. His other hand crawled up your thigh and stopped right between your legs. With his knuckle he pressed firmly against your clothed cunt and ran it up. It elicited a sound within you that you didn’t know you were capable of creating. You hadn’t felt like this before. He was teasing you.

“Have my way with you can entail in many adventures princess. I could just leave you here like this. With my thumb shoved in your mouth and my hand pressed on your clothed cunt.”

You almost cry at the thought, he wasn’t so shy after all.

He clicked his tongue, he was mocking you. “Or I could give you the pleasure of shoving my fingers inside your soaking pussy. Huh? Would you like that princess?” His thumb left your mouth. “Answer.”

“Yes.” Your voice is so weak and filled with desperation it makes him laugh.

He doesn’t ask you to repeat yourself instead he pulls your legs forcing your feet to touch the ground beneath you two. He lifts your body from the table and pressing your entire frame against his. You can feel his hardened length on your thigh and you moan at the thought of it being pushed into you.

With your bodies close together he thrusts his hips into yours and you feel his hardened cock press against you. “Oh my god...” you muttered grasping at the fabric of his coat. He presses against you again, again, and again.

You’re a whining, moaning mess and you’re still clothed. You feel your own wetness grow between your legs. It feels as if you’ve soaked straight through your panties, possibly even the pair of slacks you wore.

“My, my. Y/N I haven’t even taken off your clothing. Let alone mine and you’re on the brink of coming?”

You feel humiliated but aroused and so fucking needy. You grip the collar of his coat and look at him dead in the eye. “I need you. God, I fucking need you.” You’re whining and he’s smirking at you. “Please, god -- fuck. I want your cock. Your fingers anything. Please... Mori. Please.”

He lets go of you and your legs feel weak. You used the edge of the table to support yourself and with whatever strength you had left, you seated yourself upon the table. You sat with your legs wide and on instinct your hand fell atop your clothed cunt. You looked down and your suspicion’s were true. You had soiled straight through your panties and you sighed in arousal.

Mori had his back towards you and you couldn’t waste time with deciphering his behavior so instead you slip your own slacks off. You left your panties on and slid further back on the table in order for your feet to be placed upon it as well. You trace your index finger right across the slit of your cunt --- “it’s so fucking wet.” You moaned it was performative, purposeful. You wanted him to turn around.

You touch yourself through your thin panties innocently and the room is filled with your soft, delicate moans. Your eyes are on his back and you watched as he looked at you over his shoulder. Your eyes pleaded at him.

Mori turned and your mouth watered at the sight of his hardened cock even though it was hidden behind the fabric of his pants. He reached for your wrist and tore it from your cunt. He gripped it tightly.

“You’re so cute.” He praised you. “But if you think you think you can sit there and play with yourself without my explicit permission you must be out of your fucking mind.” He finished his sentence by placing your fingers in his mouth. He coated the sweetness of your pussy in his mouth and for the first time his moan, his sweet audible moan blended with yours.

“Lay back.” He asked removing his coat. “This is where the fun begins.”

[akysi]

Finished this late last night but waited to upload it until now.  I wasn’t actually going to shade it in this way at all but then I remembered the idea I had with Snowy and another character’s complimentary colour schemes, hence the blue and orange. I also found my textured brush again so I went to town with it here lol.

My main idea for my Feather Knights story is having Snowy grow up over time, so he’s older here. He progresses through the story learning more about the realities of becoming a knight, more specifically about morality and, in this case, loss. My sad owl son fjhsdkfhjsd

Now I’m going to dump a heckton of story stuff that I really want to write down below the cut because I’m super excited about them but it’s going to be really long and ANYWAY HOPE YOU LIKE <3

Okay STORY TIME KIDS (technically spoilers but I won’t have this story out anywhere for a loooong time yet so idc)

Alright so as I mentioned I want this story to progress with enough time for Snowy to grow up during it, both physically and mentally. You don’t become a knight quickly anyway so it makes sense in context. I’ve honestly wanted to do a story like this for eons because it’s really fun to draw aged up characters, and I’m glad I could fit that idea here.

I’m still working out the logistics of the world this story, but the general idea is that the royalty of this world have spiritual connections that grant them the abilities of other non-human creatures (wings, multiple limbs, heightened senses, etc.). It’s essentially split into air, land and sea for this reason, but the physical changes vary depending on how in favour one is with the spirits. Different kingdoms and such, but even within the sections there is still hierarchy as a result. The most coveted of these are the rulers of the skies (i.e. people with wings), specifically the Feather Knight Order, led by Prince Arvais. Though this story is told from Snowy’s perspective, the Feather Knights as a whole are a main driving force for the plot outside of Snowy’s perspective, namely in the conflict between the Feather Knights and the Leatherback Guild (main antags).

Prince Arvais’s initial interest in Snowy (and at first the only reason he keeps him around) is because Snowy is the first person without royal blood to be given wings by the spirits. And no, he’s not revealed to be of royal blood later in the story either. I wanted to avoid that trope as much as possible as his lack of royal blood would actually serve as the catalyst to instigate the conflict further, but also resolve it in the end. Though the prince starts out to be pretty self-centered, he develops an attachment to Snowy and becomes a bit of a father figure for him.

On their travels Snowy meets Kira, who later joins the Feather Knights as the Butterfly Knight, and is an axe wielder rather than the traditional sword fighter. As you might be able to interpret from the art she is killed in battle, but not before Snowy gets to know her and later develops an affection for her too. She’s with the troop for a long time and I want her death to be powerful, acting as a turning point for Snowy’s character. Quite literally the death of his innocence, as prior to this both he and Kira still had that child-like drive to be a hero and help the innocent, while not understanding what that truly entails. Snowy isn’t your typical excitable hero, but he’s still young enough to have that kind of naivety.

This does steel Snowy’s resolve to confront the one that murdered her, but not in the same way that most revenge stories go. I’ve always pictured Snowy as a character that, while he still does outwardly express emotion, is level-headed, direct, and can verbally communicate with ease and tact. Therefore it is not likely for him to have his emotions overwhelm him and feed his desire for revenge in a cloud of rage, losing sight of what’s important. Snowy had to deal with the loss of his father at an early age, and thus had to take on his responsibilities on the farm with his mother. He has a strong sense of duty to the mission at hand, and Prince Arvais sees this potential when his order visits Snowy’s village at the beginning of the story.

I pictured a moment where Snowy meets other nobles from inside and outside the kingdom, and his unique situation makes them question or downright mock Snowy for his background as a farm boy. One particularly boisterous noble brings up the recent loss of Kira and how that reflected poorly on Snowy’s order’s skills in keeping their team alive. A ridiculously low blow to be sure, but Snowy simply turns around and politely challenges the noble to a duel to see if his claims are correct. The noble puts up a good fight, but Snowy’s agility and skill far surpasses his, and I’ll likely have this scene parallel with an earlier one to show Snowy’s progression.

I have another scene lined up where it’s actually the main antagonist, Dragon Knight, who gives Snowy a suddenly wider perspective on the whole conflict, making him realize he’s been strung along quite a bit up to this point. Dragon Knight’s points are valid, mind you, as I wanted this underlying conflict to have a two-sided argument to it. While his actions and mentalities are ultimately not good ones, you understand the other side of the conflict and there are more grey areas than black and white. If anyone reading this is a Transformers fan, I was inspired by the dynamic between the Autobots and Decepticons that, if done right, shows the differing ideologies of both groups without necessarily painting one as “good” and one as “evil”, but rather a difficulty in co-existing. Not all iterations of the Transformers IP do this, but the good ones do.

Aside from dragons, the snowy owl and monarch butterfly are two of the most significant creatures from my childhood, so incorporating that into a story with themes of innocence really gives me a strong personal connection to it. I also plan to have characters for the red fox, domestic cat, dragonfly and northern cardinal for the same reason, though so far I’ve only designed Dee as the Dragonfly Knight. I also have Arack as my Spider Knight, though spiders are significant to me for different reasons, aha. xD (I love my spider boy though he’s really fun to draw). They’ll all be a part of Snowy’s clan as he strikes out on his own for a bit, due to the underlying conflict mentioned earlier. I’ll probably talk more about that later but this is getting long enough as it is, lol.

[decolonize-corona]

A Genealogy of Disasters

For a long time, natural disasters were seen as just that: natural, God-given, fate. 

Hurricanes, tornadoes, drought were sometimes even seen as punishment for immoral human behavior, and would cause victims to blindly accept or internalize the destruction. In 1976, however, researchers Phil O’Keefe, Ken Westgate and Ben Wisner published an article in the journal Nature that changed the spirit of disaster research. Their writing sought to take the “naturalness out of natural disasters” in the world’s mind. Years later, researchers from many different fields have come to understand the anthropogenic side of disasters: how human presence and activity produces the disaster, especially for the vulnerable (Faas, 2016). After all, without humans, there is no disaster, and the humans affected the most are the ones socially positioned to be the most vulnerable.

Vulnerability has long since played an important role in anthropological discourse about disaster, but recently, researchers have noticed how the anthropogenic side of disasters has become increasingly active in creating and perpetuating human, animal, and environmental suffering. Through the enormous use of fossil fuels with industrialization, humans have altered the climate, creating a situation of climate turmoil, coined by Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer (2014) to describe the increasing frequency and intensity of storms, droughts, extreme temperatures, and other abnormal conditions of nature due to rising world surface temperatures. 

Not only are disasters affected by anthropogenic environmental changes, but are also intentionally produced by human activity. Naomi Kline describes certain disasters in the current neoliberal capitalist world as disaster capitalism (Kline, 2007). Very powerful market fundamentalists actively take advantage of times of vulnerability from disaster to profit, in the name of development, and only that sustained vulnerability allows such profiting to continue. As humans with power commit horrible deeds as if they had the immunity or even benevolence of gods, the most innocent suffer nature’s retaliating consequences.

“Taking the Naturalness Out of Natural Disaster” 

After analyzing data from academic institutions, insurance companies, governmental agencies, and international organizations, O’Keefe, Westgate and Wisner found that from 1947 to 1973, there was a clear increase in the number of disasters and loss of life in the those disasters. What they noticed is that not only are these numbers increasingly dramatically over time, but a majority of those deadly disasters were occurring in “underdeveloped” regions globally. 

In acknowledging the disproportionate occurrence of disaster fatalities in certain populations of the world, disaster research soon came to question what characterized those populations. The all shared vulnerability, but different kinds. Faas (2016) describes and elucidates Elizabeth Marino’s breakdown of four conceptualizations of vulnerability (Marino, 2015 working from Adger, 2006) with examples from Faas’s own ethnography of two Mount Tungurahua eruptions in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. The four frameworks are a) the hazards or exposure model, b) the lack of resources model, c) the political ecology model, and d) the pressure-and-release model (Wisner, 2004).

The hazards or exposure model focuses on the exposure to environmental hazards, like living near or in tornado alleys, coasts, and fault lines. In the case of the Mount Tungurahua eruptions, thousands of people lived directly on the volcano; in some cases, some people even lived near gorges that directly funnel lava and pyroclastic flows. The exposure radius to hazards increases when ash fall is taken into account, which can travel great distances.

While the hazards model focuses entirely on exposure to a potentially dangerous environment, the lack of resources model places vulnerability entirely in the hands of the people. This model assumes that the grievances people face are not a result of nature, but are due to social relations of power that creates barriers to resources and aid. Before the first eruption in 1999, many locals living on the volcano lacked the infrastructure and resources to avoid or mitigate the disaster. With only a few roads to leave the area, including many that would pass directly through gorges, locals had a difficult time escaping and obtaining resources to rebuild their property after the disaster. After the 2006 eruption, the government didn’t bother to rebuild the infrastructure in the volcano area, leaving many people to struggle to survive on the disaster zone, which was, unfortunately, the only place economically viable for many.

The political ecology model attempts to acknowledge the roles humans and the environment both play in disasters by looking at the historical dynamics within societies that are set within environments containing hazards and scarce resources. It seeks to understand the “historical production of vulnerability” and how the most marginalized groups have come to bear the most risks and have the least resources and decision-making power to deal with those risks. To understand why locals lacked the ability to mitigate the eruption and properly recover from the disaster, and how they came to live on the volcano in the first place, Faas examined the history there, from Spanish colonialism, to the hacienda system, to land reforms, to “clientelist politics”. The Spanish brought the indigenous peoples to the volcano to produce labor on haciendas (plantations), and through changes in policy and differential access to the world outside the volcano, the historically produced elites came to own most of the proper infrastructure and alternative livelihoods (outside the volcano area), while the subjugated laborers came to own very little in terms of property, and very much in terms of risk, physically and economically. Therefore, when the volcano erupted, the historically marginalized communities’ vulnerability resulted in a worse disaster for them.

According to Faas, critics of political ecology say that the model still fails to place enough responsibility on the environment. Wisner (2004) takes a model from ecology to balance the burden: R(d) = V x H. Risk of disaster is equal to sociopolitically produced vulnerability AND hazards of the environment. The pressure and release model entails that as pressure in a system increases, the system will eventually collapse or transform. Regarding the Mount Tungurahua locals, Faas noted how land options were very scarce to poor agropastoralists, so they had little choice but to live on the volcano, land with little infrastructural development due to eruptions in the past. The vulnerability deriving from their position in society and the hazard of living in a naturally dangerous and poorly-built environment explains the disaster in this model. 

These conceptualizations of vulnerability collectively illuminate how social processes and relationships through history come to influence and direct how different members of a stratified society live and interact with a natural and built environment. In 1976, O’Keefe, Westgate and Wisner just noticed the tip of an iceberg composed of colonialism, migration, and stratification. As how every society has an unique history with its environment and between its people, every disaster is thus just as unique. 

Disaster Capitalism: The “Second Tsunami of Corporate Globalization”

That is not to say there are no unifying themes between societies and their disasters. Today especially, disasters are marked by globalization, otherwise known as neoliberal capitalism. As many corporations and industries around the world continue to doggedly produce and burn fossil fuels, climate turmoil affects everyone, with the economically poorest suffering the most. It seems that hardly any hurricane, drought, or heatwave can escape bearing the insignia of humankind nowadays. Our task in the years to come has outpaced the agenda of O’Keefe, Westgate and Wisner in 1976; no longer are we trying to convince the public that “natural” disasters are so destructive and deadly due to the sociopolitical positioning of people in hazardous environments. We are now trying to convince the majority that the weather disasters themselves are actually worsened by human activity. In addition, though this may meet more resistance, the public must understand that the disaster and suffering isn’t just caused by the weather events, but also by the greedy plundering afterwards. 

Naomi Kline (2007) defines disaster capitalism as “...orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities”. In her book, The Shock Doctrine, she rigorously provides many examples of this, like the 2004 tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka and other nearby islands. After the bloody Sri Lankan civil war came to an end, market fundamentalists like the World Bank and USAID made plans for bringing the “untouched” island into the global economy by turning it into a high-end resort paradise for the “plutonomy”, the billionaires that could hold up tourism consumption all on their own as long as income inequality remained. Their plans were drafted in Regaining Sri Lanka, a World Bank-approved program that would privatize water, fishing, and land; move the local fishing people off the coasts to make room for resorts and highways; and reform laws to provide a flexible labor force for the tourist industry. 

Initially, this was met with much resistance by the people. In a national election with Regaining Sri Lanka at stake, center-leftists and Marxists won and vowed to get rid of the entire privatization proposal. However, after the tsunami struck, which took 250,000 lives and left 2.5 million people homeless, the Sri Lankan president hardly had a choice but to accept the capitalistic demands of the foreign creditors in order to unlock aid money to rebuild. Days after her decision, the Washington lenders planted their own development committee in the Sri Lankan capital, not trusting the locals to do the job properly. The committee consisted of tourism industry stakeholders and banking executives. While they saw an opportunity to“develop”, the locals saw“a plan to drive the fishing people from the beach” (Roger, p.488) and “foreigners profiting from our misery”. They knew what was going on. When the fishing people were barred from rebuilding on the beach for“safety” reasons, yet saw the hotels continue construction; when they heard that more than $13 billions of aid had been raised in the name of their suffering, yet saw hardly $1 million directly; when they were promised new land for relocation, yet were forced to stay in their“temporary”evacuation shelters indefinitely, they knew what was going on. 

Clearly, these victims of two consecutive disasters don’t need to be convinced of the role greedy and powerful humans play in disasters. It’s the privileged people from the wealthy developed countries that need to realize that underdeveloped countries would probably fare better without their involvement (in de-developing), that capitalism has mutated into a grotesque insatiable monster, and that the majority of human beings are suffering because of it. 

Conclusion

Disaster research has come a long way within 40 years. People now understand how vulnerability can be produced, making natural disasters not so natural. In our current era, most educated people agree that climate change is real and has an effect on worsening weather events. What might take more time is convincing the majority, especially our leaders, that market fundamentalism or corporate capitalism or neoliberal capitalism, all monikers for the mutated and grotesque version that capitalism has become, seems to be hurting more than we imagined. It is absolutely unacceptable for governments and the world market to serve a select few while exploiting and marginalizing the majority. The only future in this kind of situation is a bleak one, and an increasingly apocalyptic one. Simply put, it’s not sustainable. I believe this trend will only end when the American government makes a complete ideological transformation, along with China and other world superpowers. Tough decisions and sacrifices of luxury must be made.

References

Adger, N. W. (2006). “Vulnerability”. Global Environmental Change,16. 268–281.

Baer, H. A. & Singer, M. (2014). The Anthropology of Climate Change: An Integrated Critical Perspective. New York, NY: Routledge.

Faas, A.J. (2016). “Disaster vulnerability in anthropological perspective”. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 40(1). 14-19.

Kline, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York, NY: Picador. 6, 487-512. 

Marino, E. (2015). Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground. Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press.

O’Keefe, P.; Westgate, K.; Wisner, B. (1976). “Taking the naturalness out of natural disasters”. Nature, 260. 566-567.

Wisner, B. (2004). At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability, and Disasters. 2nd edition. New York, NY: Psychology Press, Routledge.

Back to Why Capitalism Sucks

[realestate63141]

Photographer Spent 25 Years Documenting Our Absurd Obsession With Wealth

Photographer Lauren Greenfield was rummaging through approximately half a million photos she’d taken over the past 25 years. The images chronicle the Western world’s spiraling obsession with consumption and celebrity, part of her extensive project “Generation Wealth.” Specifically, Greenfield was looking for potentially overlooked connections to help round out her visual story, which starts with MTV-crazed teenagers and ends somewhere around the election of President Donald Trump. 

Greenfield zeroed in on a photo she had previously disregarded, showing a group of bored looking preteens huddled in the hallway of a Los Angeles private school dance, wearing ripped jeans, T-shirts and plaid button-downs. When she took the photo in 1992, Greenfield recognized two of the partygoers as the daughters of O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, but didn’t think much of it. Looking back, she realized she’d unwittingly captured Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, two individuals who embody the very dreams of status and spectacle she’d spent decades exploring. 

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenfield expanded upon the Kardashian’s immense influence over contemporary generations. To explain, she cites sociologist and economist Juliet Schor, who wrote the introduction to Greenfield’s monograph. “According to Schor, in America, people used to compare themselves to the person down the road,” she said. “Someone who had a little bit more than they did. Keeping up with the Joneses.”

Today, however, we’re no longer comparing ourselves with our neighbors, but with the chimerical images we encounter on TV screens and social media feeds. As Greenfield put it: “Now we’re ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians,’ comparing our houses to what we see on ‘MTV Cribs.’” The latter reference is a bit dated, but it brings us back to the project’s origins in 1992, when Greenfield first began documenting her hometown of Los Angeles.

Greenfield returned to LA after completing her first photographic assignment as an intern for National Geographic. She’d been documenting a Zinacantec Maya village in Mexico ― an “exotic” culture she knew little about. “I realized I wanted to come back to my hometown and photograph my own culture,” she said. So she returned to her high school, Crossroads, an elite private school frequented by families with Hollywood ties, whose students were constantly competing with blowout Bar Mitzvahs, expensive cars and designer purses. 

Greenfield’s first series, “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood,” focuses on the impact of media saturation on youth culture in LA. “It was the beginning of MTV,” Greenfield said. “I was seeing how rich kids, influenced by hip-hop, wanted to be like the kids of the inner city with this idea of ‘bling,’” she said. Those same kids living in inner cities, in turn, yearned to be rich. The series revealed that the appeal of wealth and fame crossed boundaries of race, class or background; most young Los Angelenos were driven by a desire for status and attention. 

“Money affects kids in many ways,” Adam, a 13-year-old subject of Greenfield’s, explained to her in a 1994 interview, the first she ever conducted. In the photo alongside Adam’s interview, he’s pictured as a pudgy pubescent grinding with a go-go dancer at his nightclub-themed Bar Mitzvah. “It has ruined a lot of kids I know,” he continued. “It has ruined me — wearing a Rolex watch to school or just buying a $200 pair of shoes. I take flying lessons. I mean, I know a person who has a soccer field and an indoor basketball court. But that person’s dad is going to jail.”

Greenfield recalled the impact Adam’s words had on her back in 1994. “I was so amazed by the acute perceptions that a kid right in the middle of it had,” she said. “I was very moved that he could see it and be critical of it and still be affected by it.”

Greenfield has interviewed and photographed young people in bathtubs and dressing rooms, at weight loss camps and eating disorder clinics, in the middle of a face lift, and just after a chemical peel ― the “Rolls Royce of rejuvenation” ― their face still coral and bubbling. “They are the truth tellers in this work,” Greenfield said, referring to her subjects. “The story, for the most part, is in their words.”

“I would say usually the people are comfortable because they kind of have to be to do this work,” Greenfield put it. To earn their trust, her process entails a lot of, in her words, hanging out. She spends weeks, months or even years with her subjects, waiting to catch that single shot that communicates something bigger. “There is no staging, there is only capturing moments. For me, it’s about trying to find moments that speak to the culture. Sometimes I understand the photos’ significance at the time, oftentimes I don’t.”

Greenfield’s extensive photographic project features 14 chapters, each focusing on a particular population, fixation or epidemic. “New Aging” explores society’s rejection of aging and the ways medicine and technology conspire to prevent its effects. In one image, a woman receives a post-operative mani-pedi in a luxury surgery-aftercare facility, her entire face covered by a mask of bandages with holes for her eyes, nose and mouth. 

“The Princess Brand” documents how even the innocent exercise of playing dress-up initiates young girls’ obsessions with luxury and desirability. Greenfield captures girls as young as 4 years old, wearing their mothers’ high heels, striking a seductive pose for the camera. Juxtaposed with “New Aging,” the series hints at how aging adults and young girls chase the same impossible ideal.

“I started to think about the connections,” Greenfield said. “The connection between a little girl and her precocious sexualization and the woman who decides to become a prostitute because she doesn’t want to make $20,000 a year anymore as a social worker, to Jackie Siegel, who decides being a beauty queen will get her closer to the American dream than her engineering degree.”

The various threads of Greenfield’s story converged during the financial crash of 2008, when her anthropological experiment suddenly resembled a morality tale. “We had lost sight of what is important and what really matters,” she said. “The crash was an opportunity to take stock of that and document this pain, pain that stretched from the working class to the ultra rich.” 

The following year, Greenfield made the documentary film “The Queen of Versailles,” which follows time-share mogul David Siegel and his third wife, Jackie, after their quest to build the largest home in the country was brutally interrupted by financial turmoil.

“In the new house it’s going to be hard to communicate with each other,” Jackie says in one interview. “Even in this house, I could scream right now and no one would hear me. I could yell for Marissa to come here, and she wouldn’t come. I have to use my cell phone. In the new house, we will have Segways to go around the house.”

Although there are urgent moral undertones to Greenfield’s project, she never casts judgment on her individual subjects. Rather, she portrays every person, from a former assembly line worker at General Motors to the sex worker famous for citing Charlie Sheen as a client, as reflections of the same cultural phenomenon. “We’re all susceptible to it,” Greenfield said. “We all become addicted.”

Greenfied’s book includes an interview with social critic Chris Hedges, who illuminates just how pervasive our generation’s preoccupation with status has become. “Celebrity culture functions like a religion,” he said, continuing:

“For one thousand years the Catholic Church ruled Europe by creating massive stained-glass windows with images of torment and hell and damnation and salvation to control society. Today we have electronic images of celebrity and wealth that do the same thing. We worship narcissistic monsters. The drive to become a celebrity is at its core a drive to become immortal. What you’re seeking is an unattainable perfection. You’re seeking essentially to become a god.”

Of course, people react to the cult of celebrity differently, with certain populations more susceptible than others. “I think the power of capitalism, and exploiting addiction in general, is looking for insecurities and weaknesses,” Greenfield said. “Everybody that has insecurities becomes a very good consumer. The way marketing works is, if you buy this thing, it will fix what you feel is missing.”

She continued to express that, though both men and women are prone to the bottomless desire for acquisition, women are societally conditioned to determine their self-worth based on their desirability. As a result, they sometimes veer from coveting commodities to becoming commodities themselves. The last chapter in the series, “Make It Rain,” visualizes this sentiment, peering into nightclubs where men shower cash onto nude dancers’ bodies. 

Today, Greenfield’s series inevitably calls to mind Trump’s rise to power ― and whether it was really that shocking at all. “It was kind of amazing because I was finishing the work over the past year while I was watching his campaign and, then, seeing him take the highest office in the land,” Greenfield recalled, “it was almost like an uncanny expression of what the work is about — proof that it was all real.” 

Trump, with his gold-plated skyscrapers and his penchant for treating women as property, is the living embodiment of “Generation Wealth.” As Greenfield put it: “His brand mixes business and celebrity and beauty pageants and power and real estate and your name as big as possible. He represented all the values of the work in their most extreme form ― his addiction to attention and admiration and even his use of Twitter.”

The sweeping “Generation Wealth” exhibition, featuring 195 prints and 42 first-person interviews, goes on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography next month. The show is based in the heart of Los Angeles, a mere five miles from Greenfield’s high school. The photos offer authentic portrayals of artifice and abundance in their many manifestations. Either dazzling or deeply disturbing, the series, 25 years in the making, offers a gold-encrusted portrait of our time. 

“I hope this provokes discussion about our values and where we are going,” Greenfield said. “It’s clear our current path is unsustainable ― environmentally and morally. It’s a value system that leads to exhaustion, collapse, and no satisfaction.”

“Generation Wealth” runs from April 8 to Aug. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. You can also pre-order Phaidon’s “Generation Wealth” monograph here. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lTgnlM

[repwinpril9y0a1]

Photographer Spent 25 Years Documenting Our Absurd Obsession With Wealth

Photographer Lauren Greenfield was rummaging through approximately half a million photos she’d taken over the past 25 years. The images chronicle the Western world’s spiraling obsession with consumption and celebrity, part of her extensive project “Generation Wealth.” Specifically, Greenfield was looking for potentially overlooked connections to help round out her visual story, which starts with MTV-crazed teenagers and ends somewhere around the election of President Donald Trump. 

Greenfield zeroed in on a photo she had previously disregarded, showing a group of bored looking preteens huddled in the hallway of a Los Angeles private school dance, wearing ripped jeans, T-shirts and plaid button-downs. When she took the photo in 1992, Greenfield recognized two of the partygoers as the daughters of O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, but didn’t think much of it. Looking back, she realized she’d unwittingly captured Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, two individuals who embody the very dreams of status and spectacle she’d spent decades exploring. 

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenfield expanded upon the Kardashian’s immense influence over contemporary generations. To explain, she cites sociologist and economist Juliet Schor, who wrote the introduction to Greenfield’s monograph. “According to Schor, in America, people used to compare themselves to the person down the road,” she said. “Someone who had a little bit more than they did. Keeping up with the Joneses.”

Today, however, we’re no longer comparing ourselves with our neighbors, but with the chimerical images we encounter on TV screens and social media feeds. As Greenfield put it: “Now we’re ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians,’ comparing our houses to what we see on ‘MTV Cribs.’” The latter reference is a bit dated, but it brings us back to the project’s origins in 1992, when Greenfield first began documenting her hometown of Los Angeles.

Greenfield returned to LA after completing her first photographic assignment as an intern for National Geographic. She’d been documenting a Zinacantec Maya village in Mexico ― an “exotic” culture she knew little about. “I realized I wanted to come back to my hometown and photograph my own culture,” she said. So she returned to her high school, Crossroads, an elite private school frequented by families with Hollywood ties, whose students were constantly competing with blowout Bar Mitzvahs, expensive cars and designer purses. 

Greenfield’s first series, “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood,” focuses on the impact of media saturation on youth culture in LA. “It was the beginning of MTV,” Greenfield said. “I was seeing how rich kids, influenced by hip-hop, wanted to be like the kids of the inner city with this idea of ‘bling,’” she said. Those same kids living in inner cities, in turn, yearned to be rich. The series revealed that the appeal of wealth and fame crossed boundaries of race, class or background; most young Los Angelenos were driven by a desire for status and attention. 

“Money affects kids in many ways,” Adam, a 13-year-old subject of Greenfield’s, explained to her in a 1994 interview, the first she ever conducted. In the photo alongside Adam’s interview, he’s pictured as a pudgy pubescent grinding with a go-go dancer at his nightclub-themed Bar Mitzvah. “It has ruined a lot of kids I know,” he continued. “It has ruined me — wearing a Rolex watch to school or just buying a $200 pair of shoes. I take flying lessons. I mean, I know a person who has a soccer field and an indoor basketball court. But that person’s dad is going to jail.”

Greenfield recalled the impact Adam’s words had on her back in 1994. “I was so amazed by the acute perceptions that a kid right in the middle of it had,” she said. “I was very moved that he could see it and be critical of it and still be affected by it.”

Greenfield has interviewed and photographed young people in bathtubs and dressing rooms, at weight loss camps and eating disorder clinics, in the middle of a face lift, and just after a chemical peel ― the “Rolls Royce of rejuvenation” ― their face still coral and bubbling. “They are the truth tellers in this work,” Greenfield said, referring to her subjects. “The story, for the most part, is in their words.”

“I would say usually the people are comfortable because they kind of have to be to do this work,” Greenfield put it. To earn their trust, her process entails a lot of, in her words, hanging out. She spends weeks, months or even years with her subjects, waiting to catch that single shot that communicates something bigger. “There is no staging, there is only capturing moments. For me, it’s about trying to find moments that speak to the culture. Sometimes I understand the photos’ significance at the time, oftentimes I don’t.”

Greenfield’s extensive photographic project features 14 chapters, each focusing on a particular population, fixation or epidemic. “New Aging” explores society’s rejection of aging and the ways medicine and technology conspire to prevent its effects. In one image, a woman receives a post-operative mani-pedi in a luxury surgery-aftercare facility, her entire face covered by a mask of bandages with holes for her eyes, nose and mouth. 

“The Princess Brand” documents how even the innocent exercise of playing dress-up initiates young girls’ obsessions with luxury and desirability. Greenfield captures girls as young as 4 years old, wearing their mothers’ high heels, striking a seductive pose for the camera. Juxtaposed with “New Aging,” the series hints at how aging adults and young girls chase the same impossible ideal.

“I started to think about the connections,” Greenfield said. “The connection between a little girl and her precocious sexualization and the woman who decides to become a prostitute because she doesn’t want to make $20,000 a year anymore as a social worker, to Jackie Siegel, who decides being a beauty queen will get her closer to the American dream than her engineering degree.”

The various threads of Greenfield’s story converged during the financial crash of 2008, when her anthropological experiment suddenly resembled a morality tale. “We had lost sight of what is important and what really matters,” she said. “The crash was an opportunity to take stock of that and document this pain, pain that stretched from the working class to the ultra rich.” 

The following year, Greenfield made the documentary film “The Queen of Versailles,” which follows time-share mogul David Siegel and his third wife, Jackie, after their quest to build the largest home in the country was brutally interrupted by financial turmoil.

“In the new house it’s going to be hard to communicate with each other,” Jackie says in one interview. “Even in this house, I could scream right now and no one would hear me. I could yell for Marissa to come here, and she wouldn’t come. I have to use my cell phone. In the new house, we will have Segways to go around the house.”

Although there are urgent moral undertones to Greenfield’s project, she never casts judgment on her individual subjects. Rather, she portrays every person, from a former assembly line worker at General Motors to the sex worker famous for citing Charlie Sheen as a client, as reflections of the same cultural phenomenon. “We’re all susceptible to it,” Greenfield said. “We all become addicted.”

Greenfied’s book includes an interview with social critic Chris Hedges, who illuminates just how pervasive our generation’s preoccupation with status has become. “Celebrity culture functions like a religion,” he said, continuing:

“For one thousand years the Catholic Church ruled Europe by creating massive stained-glass windows with images of torment and hell and damnation and salvation to control society. Today we have electronic images of celebrity and wealth that do the same thing. We worship narcissistic monsters. The drive to become a celebrity is at its core a drive to become immortal. What you’re seeking is an unattainable perfection. You’re seeking essentially to become a god.”

Of course, people react to the cult of celebrity differently, with certain populations more susceptible than others. “I think the power of capitalism, and exploiting addiction in general, is looking for insecurities and weaknesses,” Greenfield said. “Everybody that has insecurities becomes a very good consumer. The way marketing works is, if you buy this thing, it will fix what you feel is missing.”

She continued to express that, though both men and women are prone to the bottomless desire for acquisition, women are societally conditioned to determine their self-worth based on their desirability. As a result, they sometimes veer from coveting commodities to becoming commodities themselves. The last chapter in the series, “Make It Rain,” visualizes this sentiment, peering into nightclubs where men shower cash onto nude dancers’ bodies. 

Today, Greenfield’s series inevitably calls to mind Trump’s rise to power ― and whether it was really that shocking at all. “It was kind of amazing because I was finishing the work over the past year while I was watching his campaign and, then, seeing him take the highest office in the land,” Greenfield recalled, “it was almost like an uncanny expression of what the work is about — proof that it was all real.” 

Trump, with his gold-plated skyscrapers and his penchant for treating women as property, is the living embodiment of “Generation Wealth.” As Greenfield put it: “His brand mixes business and celebrity and beauty pageants and power and real estate and your name as big as possible. He represented all the values of the work in their most extreme form ― his addiction to attention and admiration and even his use of Twitter.”

The sweeping “Generation Wealth” exhibition, featuring 195 prints and 42 first-person interviews, goes on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography next month. The show is based in the heart of Los Angeles, a mere five miles from Greenfield’s high school. The photos offer authentic portrayals of artifice and abundance in their many manifestations. Either dazzling or deeply disturbing, the series, 25 years in the making, offers a gold-encrusted portrait of our time. 

“I hope this provokes discussion about our values and where we are going,” Greenfield said. “It’s clear our current path is unsustainable ― environmentally and morally. It’s a value system that leads to exhaustion, collapse, and no satisfaction.”

“Generation Wealth” runs from April 8 to Aug. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. You can also pre-order Phaidon’s “Generation Wealth” monograph here. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lTgnlM

[repwincoml4a0a5]

Photographer Spent 25 Years Documenting Our Absurd Obsession With Wealth

Photographer Lauren Greenfield was rummaging through approximately half a million photos she’d taken over the past 25 years. The images chronicle the Western world’s spiraling obsession with consumption and celebrity, part of her extensive project “Generation Wealth.” Specifically, Greenfield was looking for potentially overlooked connections to help round out her visual story, which starts with MTV-crazed teenagers and ends somewhere around the election of President Donald Trump. 

Greenfield zeroed in on a photo she had previously disregarded, showing a group of bored looking preteens huddled in the hallway of a Los Angeles private school dance, wearing ripped jeans, T-shirts and plaid button-downs. When she took the photo in 1992, Greenfield recognized two of the partygoers as the daughters of O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, but didn’t think much of it. Looking back, she realized she’d unwittingly captured Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, two individuals who embody the very dreams of status and spectacle she’d spent decades exploring. 

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenfield expanded upon the Kardashian’s immense influence over contemporary generations. To explain, she cites sociologist and economist Juliet Schor, who wrote the introduction to Greenfield’s monograph. “According to Schor, in America, people used to compare themselves to the person down the road,” she said. “Someone who had a little bit more than they did. Keeping up with the Joneses.”

Today, however, we’re no longer comparing ourselves with our neighbors, but with the chimerical images we encounter on TV screens and social media feeds. As Greenfield put it: “Now we’re ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians,’ comparing our houses to what we see on ‘MTV Cribs.’” The latter reference is a bit dated, but it brings us back to the project’s origins in 1992, when Greenfield first began documenting her hometown of Los Angeles.

Greenfield returned to LA after completing her first photographic assignment as an intern for National Geographic. She’d been documenting a Zinacantec Maya village in Mexico ― an “exotic” culture she knew little about. “I realized I wanted to come back to my hometown and photograph my own culture,” she said. So she returned to her high school, Crossroads, an elite private school frequented by families with Hollywood ties, whose students were constantly competing with blowout Bar Mitzvahs, expensive cars and designer purses. 

Greenfield’s first series, “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood,” focuses on the impact of media saturation on youth culture in LA. “It was the beginning of MTV,” Greenfield said. “I was seeing how rich kids, influenced by hip-hop, wanted to be like the kids of the inner city with this idea of ‘bling,’” she said. Those same kids living in inner cities, in turn, yearned to be rich. The series revealed that the appeal of wealth and fame crossed boundaries of race, class or background; most young Los Angelenos were driven by a desire for status and attention. 

“Money affects kids in many ways,” Adam, a 13-year-old subject of Greenfield’s, explained to her in a 1994 interview, the first she ever conducted. In the photo alongside Adam’s interview, he’s pictured as a pudgy pubescent grinding with a go-go dancer at his nightclub-themed Bar Mitzvah. “It has ruined a lot of kids I know,” he continued. “It has ruined me — wearing a Rolex watch to school or just buying a $200 pair of shoes. I take flying lessons. I mean, I know a person who has a soccer field and an indoor basketball court. But that person’s dad is going to jail.”

Greenfield recalled the impact Adam’s words had on her back in 1994. “I was so amazed by the acute perceptions that a kid right in the middle of it had,” she said. “I was very moved that he could see it and be critical of it and still be affected by it.”

Greenfield has interviewed and photographed young people in bathtubs and dressing rooms, at weight loss camps and eating disorder clinics, in the middle of a face lift, and just after a chemical peel ― the “Rolls Royce of rejuvenation” ― their face still coral and bubbling. “They are the truth tellers in this work,” Greenfield said, referring to her subjects. “The story, for the most part, is in their words.”

“I would say usually the people are comfortable because they kind of have to be to do this work,” Greenfield put it. To earn their trust, her process entails a lot of, in her words, hanging out. She spends weeks, months or even years with her subjects, waiting to catch that single shot that communicates something bigger. “There is no staging, there is only capturing moments. For me, it’s about trying to find moments that speak to the culture. Sometimes I understand the photos’ significance at the time, oftentimes I don’t.”

Greenfield’s extensive photographic project features 14 chapters, each focusing on a particular population, fixation or epidemic. “New Aging” explores society’s rejection of aging and the ways medicine and technology conspire to prevent its effects. In one image, a woman receives a post-operative mani-pedi in a luxury surgery-aftercare facility, her entire face covered by a mask of bandages with holes for her eyes, nose and mouth. 

“The Princess Brand” documents how even the innocent exercise of playing dress-up initiates young girls’ obsessions with luxury and desirability. Greenfield captures girls as young as 4 years old, wearing their mothers’ high heels, striking a seductive pose for the camera. Juxtaposed with “New Aging,” the series hints at how aging adults and young girls chase the same impossible ideal.

“I started to think about the connections,” Greenfield said. “The connection between a little girl and her precocious sexualization and the woman who decides to become a prostitute because she doesn’t want to make $20,000 a year anymore as a social worker, to Jackie Siegel, who decides being a beauty queen will get her closer to the American dream than her engineering degree.”

The various threads of Greenfield’s story converged during the financial crash of 2008, when her anthropological experiment suddenly resembled a morality tale. “We had lost sight of what is important and what really matters,” she said. “The crash was an opportunity to take stock of that and document this pain, pain that stretched from the working class to the ultra rich.” 

The following year, Greenfield made the documentary film “The Queen of Versailles,” which follows time-share mogul David Siegel and his third wife, Jackie, after their quest to build the largest home in the country was brutally interrupted by financial turmoil.

“In the new house it’s going to be hard to communicate with each other,” Jackie says in one interview. “Even in this house, I could scream right now and no one would hear me. I could yell for Marissa to come here, and she wouldn’t come. I have to use my cell phone. In the new house, we will have Segways to go around the house.”

Although there are urgent moral undertones to Greenfield’s project, she never casts judgment on her individual subjects. Rather, she portrays every person, from a former assembly line worker at General Motors to the sex worker famous for citing Charlie Sheen as a client, as reflections of the same cultural phenomenon. “We’re all susceptible to it,” Greenfield said. “We all become addicted.”

Greenfied’s book includes an interview with social critic Chris Hedges, who illuminates just how pervasive our generation’s preoccupation with status has become. “Celebrity culture functions like a religion,” he said, continuing:

“For one thousand years the Catholic Church ruled Europe by creating massive stained-glass windows with images of torment and hell and damnation and salvation to control society. Today we have electronic images of celebrity and wealth that do the same thing. We worship narcissistic monsters. The drive to become a celebrity is at its core a drive to become immortal. What you’re seeking is an unattainable perfection. You’re seeking essentially to become a god.”

Of course, people react to the cult of celebrity differently, with certain populations more susceptible than others. “I think the power of capitalism, and exploiting addiction in general, is looking for insecurities and weaknesses,” Greenfield said. “Everybody that has insecurities becomes a very good consumer. The way marketing works is, if you buy this thing, it will fix what you feel is missing.”

She continued to express that, though both men and women are prone to the bottomless desire for acquisition, women are societally conditioned to determine their self-worth based on their desirability. As a result, they sometimes veer from coveting commodities to becoming commodities themselves. The last chapter in the series, “Make It Rain,” visualizes this sentiment, peering into nightclubs where men shower cash onto nude dancers’ bodies. 

Today, Greenfield’s series inevitably calls to mind Trump’s rise to power ― and whether it was really that shocking at all. “It was kind of amazing because I was finishing the work over the past year while I was watching his campaign and, then, seeing him take the highest office in the land,” Greenfield recalled, “it was almost like an uncanny expression of what the work is about — proof that it was all real.” 

Trump, with his gold-plated skyscrapers and his penchant for treating women as property, is the living embodiment of “Generation Wealth.” As Greenfield put it: “His brand mixes business and celebrity and beauty pageants and power and real estate and your name as big as possible. He represented all the values of the work in their most extreme form ― his addiction to attention and admiration and even his use of Twitter.”

The sweeping “Generation Wealth” exhibition, featuring 195 prints and 42 first-person interviews, goes on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography next month. The show is based in the heart of Los Angeles, a mere five miles from Greenfield’s high school. The photos offer authentic portrayals of artifice and abundance in their many manifestations. Either dazzling or deeply disturbing, the series, 25 years in the making, offers a gold-encrusted portrait of our time. 

“I hope this provokes discussion about our values and where we are going,” Greenfield said. “It’s clear our current path is unsustainable ― environmentally and morally. It’s a value system that leads to exhaustion, collapse, and no satisfaction.”

“Generation Wealth” runs from April 8 to Aug. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. You can also pre-order Phaidon’s “Generation Wealth” monograph here. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lTgnlM