Illustrating Plutocracy

One recent work I’ve seen that has probably elicited the most conflicted reaction from me in quite a long time comes from Arizona-based photographer Mark Bordine. According to his website (now defunct), he has had a 35-year career as a photographer, educator, and independent video producer, with his photographs published in numerous calendars and magazines, and his own travel programs broadcast nationally on PBS.

At the present, Mark is exhibiting and continuing photography-based work for a series called Little Meditations, described by Mark’s writer Len Bahl as a collection of images that “artfully transport the viewer through a subconscious journey to places and times previously unknown, thought to be understood, or just plain unimaginable.”

The pestering work that I still cannot forget comes from Little Meditations and is (perhaps not so aptly) titled Plutocracy. In this image, whose chromatic scheme appears mostly black and white with hints of sepia, a Noir-esque environment emerges, with two contrasting subjects at opposite diagonal corners: near the top left, an distant obese figure sits on a raised platform under a close lamplight, while near the lower right, a closer and relatively small band of hands rise upward in random and almost chaotic poses, lit from an unseen light source above them.

I got the rare chance of actually discussing the work with the artist in person. He explained to me his intention of using the obese statue to represent wealth, and the hands below as the struggling working class, clamoring to reach the level of the figure but remaining low and far away.

With this view, I do have to credit Mark’s take on this topic from a historical perspective. Before the days of McDonald’s dollar menus and middle-class access to the right to vote and to choose from a dizzying array of diets, lifestyles, and opportunities, social economic conditions in past known societies tended to appear more obvious. If you were wealthy, you had the ability to have more food on your table and probably didn’t need to physically exercise as much as say, farmers did, to retain your riches (especially if you were royalty), and would have a chance to grow fat and represent your status in that way.

Considering the socioeconomic battles between the haves and have-nots of centuries past, this concept makes some sense. But in today’s terms, in which I was leaning more toward, plutocracy doesn’t really look like this anymore. Nowadays, people from all walks of life, poor and rich at least in the U.S., are more familiar with what healthier lifestyles entail while being aware of what they can afford. Now it is rather cheap and easy to get fat, while one has to work hard and pay more to get and remain fit. The juxtaposition in Plutocracy seemed to send totally different messages to me than what the artist desired, and soon after we began talking about this piece, it became clear that we did not see eye-to-eye on its meaning.

If I could make suggestions on making the intended message of this work more in line to what Mark wants his viewers to think about, I would start with focusing on visual references to money in particular, because simply showing a corpulent person in this day and age is not enough to convey a higher class of society. Perhaps the figure could be shown holding and/or sitting on money—or even have money coming out of its orifices! Also, I think having more hands reaching up, and shown smaller, would draw attention to the significance of the disparity between the powerful rich and weaker poor.